Police in riot gear attempted to dismantle the anti-Israel encampment on the University of California, Los Angeles in a chaotic scene Thursday, as protesters unleashed pepper spray and fire extinguishers on officers. Flashbangs echoed across the Los Angeles campus as California Highway Patrol was seen taking apart the tent setup, CNN reported. The protesters had previously...

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Canceling people’s debt from unpaid medical bills does not lead to improvements in their health or finances, according to a new study. | Getty Images The US leaves millions of people with outstanding medical bills. How do we help them? Four in 10 Americans carry some kind of medical debt, an affliction that is unique to the United States among wealthy nations. The country does not guarantee medical insurance to everyone, and the costs even to people who carry coverage are much higher on average than they are for patients in the rest of the developed world. It’s a fundamental flaw in the design of the US health care system. Those debts weigh on the people who carry them: Research has found that people who incur substantial medical bills (after a cancer diagnosis, for example) report cutting back on everyday spending, depleting their savings, and even downsizing their homes. Medical debt is associated with poorer general health, as well as higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and overall mortality. People end up sicker because they can’t afford their health care. In the absence of politically difficult health care reform, activists and some state and local governments have set up medical debt relief programs, purchasing the debts of people in difficult financial circumstances for much less than face value and wiping them out at no cost to the patient. But a new study of medical debt relief by a group of top economists has called its value into question. Participants who had their debt erased did not see their mental or physical health or their access to credit improve much after debt relief. There was even evidence that some people felt more depressed. “It would be great if we could improve people’s mental health, we could ease their finances, we could get them to go to the doctor more often by buying debt for less than a penny on a dollar,” Francis Wong, a University of Munich economist who co-authored the study, told me. “But it just didn’t work.” The findings stunned the researchers. While it might still be premature to discard medical debt relief based on one study, the research raises important questions about the limits of debt relief, and about how to use finite government and philanthropic resources to alleviate high health care costs. One lesson of the paper may be that relieving debt long after it’s accrued is ultimately a Band-Aid on the structural problems within US health care. Many people with medical debt are contending with other financial problems compounded by their health expenses, which are not easily undone by eliminating hospital bills. Preventing medical debt in the first place may be more effective. “The punchline for me is that you really need to tackle the root cause that created all of these issues in the first place, that created the financial distress and poor mental health,” Wong said. “That’s a matter of addressing the holes in the American health care system.” Medical debt relief didn’t do much to improve people’s finances The research team — including Wong, Harvard’s Raymond Kluender, Stanford’s Neale Mahoney, and UCLA’s Wesley Yin — was commissioned to study a group of 83,400 people who collectively had $169 million in medical debt relieved through the organization RIP Medical Debt (recently renamed Undue Medical Debt). The study analyzed two groups of patients: one had held their debts for seven years on average, the other for a little more than a year. Using surveys and financial data, the experiment tracked most patients for about a year after they received debt relief. Compared to patients who did not have their debt wiped out, the researchers found, the relief had negligible effects on participants’ access to credit and other measures of financial well-being. Credit scores increased by a marginal 3.6 points on average, though for people whose only debt had been medical debt, there was a more sizable 13.4-point increase. The average increase in credit limits was just $342. Participants whose debt was relieved actually became less likely to pay future medical bills, the study found. The results showed no improvements in objective and subjective measures of financial distress. One reason may be that although participants had an average of $2,167 in debt relieved, they had plenty of other, non-medical debt. The group averaged $28,000 in debts including things like credit card balances and car loans. An average of $4,000 in bills had already reached collections. “The most striking thing to me was just how much financial distress that folks with medical debt are experiencing broadly,” Kluender said. “The debt relief that we were able to execute through the experiment was insufficient to address their financial deprivation.” People in medical debt are often pestered by collectors and forced into even more debt to pay their bills and cut their spending on necessities such as food and rent. People did not report feeling happier or healthier after debt relief The study also found that measures of depression, stress, anxiety, subjective feelings of well-being, and general health barely budged after debt was wiped out. One finding is especially telling. Before the experiment began, the authors asked a panel of 45 experts what they expected the study to find. Panelists anticipated on average a 7 percentage point reduction in the number of patients reporting moderate or worse depression. Instead, the study showed a 3.2-percentage point increase in patients reporting that they were depressed. That’s on top of the 45 percent of participants who reported having at least moderate depression before the experiment began. The worst mental health effects were found among the 25 percent of participants with the most medical debt: They experienced a 12.4-percent increase in depression along with “worsening of anxiety, stress, general health, and subjective well-being” after debt relief. “That’s just staggeringly high rates of poor mental health,” Wong said. How can that be? One possibility is that the relief came too late to undo the severe mental health burden of carrying debt for months or years. Such patients have “already been scarred by the collection process,” Mahoney told me, and will continue to struggle with non-medical debts. “That’s the sort of person who on a weekly basis is getting hounded by debt collectors, not just sort of the medical debt collectors that we study, but debt collectors of all sorts,” Wong said. Medical debt relief “really doesn’t do anything to alleviate any of those other conditions, not to mention whatever health condition led them to incur medical debt in the first place.” The researchers identified another plausible theory through a sub-experiment included in the study, which tested the reactions of patients based on how they were informed of their debt relief, either by phone call or by letter. Among the people who received a direct phone call to let them know, the negative mental health effects were greater. Prior research has found that Americans tend to feel shame and stigma when receiving charitable or government aid to pay their bills. Participants had not requested debt relief, the study noted, but rather had it purchased and wiped out by RIP Medical Debt without their prior knowledge (this is often how medical debt relief programs work). It’s possible that the very act of filling out the study’s surveys may have affected how the respondents perceived their own situation. “We’re reminding people of this unpleasant experience that they had,” Kluender told me. “And maybe they were going through some unpleasant negotiations with their insurer or they feel a lot of guilt and shame about being unable to pay the bill.” What do we do with this information? The disappointing findings are especially surprising in light of research on relief programs for other types of debt, like credit card debt and student loan debt, that has found improvements in financial health and job prospects. Medical debt, like those other types of debt, has been associated with worse health and a weaker financial situation. But medical debt has some distinct characteristics. Repayment rates are much lower than they are for student loans or mortgages. Once a medical bill reaches collections, it’s often resolved with a negotiated settlement, which can result in much lower payments than what the patient originally owed. So the study participants, who had carried their debt for more than a year at a minimum, may have already been subconsciously writing off the medical debt by the time relief came, the authors said. That limits the impact they may feel when it’s wiped out. Some experts not involved in the study think the findings may understate the benefits of medical debt relief, especially on people’s finances, based on earlier studies of medical debt relief that had found larger benefits for people’s credit scores and credit access. The effect on credit scores is increasingly a moot point, however. Credit agencies have agreed to stop reporting most medical debt on people’s credit reports, after urging from the Biden administration, a step taken in the midst of the experiment. (The study relied on a subset of people whose debt was relieved prior to that announcement.) Amy Finkelstein, a leading researcher on health care costs at MIT whose nonprofit J-PAL North America helped fund the study, said she was shocked by the results but grateful to have them. Part of the difficult work of policymaking is to soberly assess the results of what you are doing. “Yes, it’s disappointing. But another way of saying it is: This was true whether or not we had done the study,” Finkelstein told me. “So it’s good to know so that we can try to learn from it and move on.” Everybody I spoke to agreed on one thing: Preventing people from accruing medical debt in the first place would likely be more effective in improving their finances and health than relieving debts after the fact. One-time debt relief may not make it any easier or less stressful to access health care in the future, but providing people with health coverage that eliminates the risk of debt does. That hypothesis is supported by existing evidence. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a totemic work in health care research, found that low-income adults who received Medicaid saw a 9 percent reduction in depression. They were also less likely to end up in debt because of a medical bill and less likely to take out loans or skip payments on their other necessities to cover their health care balance. Experts I spoke to named more robust interventions that could lead to less medical debt and better health and financial outcomes, including more generous insurance benefits for people already covered. Covering the 26 million Americans who remain uninsured would be another step. Most states in the Deep South still haven’t expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), leaving millions of low-income people without coverage. Other proposals, such as more public insurance options, have gained increasing support among Democrats. “As a consumer advocate, the best solution would be single-payer, Medicare for all,” Chi Chi Wu, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, said. But major overhauls are easier said than done. The history of US health care reform is one of a country inching toward universal health coverage: Medicare and Medicaid passed in the 1960s, and the ACA didn’t come along until 2010. Our byzantine insurance system with weak cost controls persists, with a massive health care industry invested in maintaining the status quo. In the meantime, experts said, policymakers could focus on making sure that hospital financial assistance programs are accessible to more people. Many patients are eligible for aid that would significantly reduce what they owe — but they often have no idea it’s available. The New York Times reported in 2022 that some hospitals were making it extremely difficult for eligible patients to find out about and use assistance programs, while aggressively seeking payment even from patients who should qualify for aid. The long-term project of universal health care continues. The debt relief study, disappointing as its results might be, may spur some fresh thinking about how to better help people.

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Nude images shared without consent can be traumatic, whether they’re real or not. | Getty Images/iStockphoto How do you stop deepfake nudes? There’s a lot of debate about the role of technology in kids’ lives, but sometimes we come across something unequivocally bad. That’s the case with AI “nudification” apps, which teenagers are using to generate and share fake naked photos of their classmates. At Issaquah High School in Washington state, boys used an app to “strip” photos of girls who attended last fall’s homecoming dance, according to the New York Times. At Westfield High School in New Jersey, 10th grade boys created fabricated explicit images of some of their female classmates and shared them around school. Students from California to Illinois have had deepfake nudes shared without their consent, in what experts call a form of “image-based sexual abuse.” Now advocates — including some teens — are backing laws that impose penalties for creating and sharing deepfake nudes. Legislation has passed in Washington, South Dakota, and Louisiana, and is in the works in California and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Rep. Joseph Morelle (D-NY) has reintroduced a bill that would make sharing the images a federal crime. Francesca Mani, a 15-year-old Westfield student whose deepfaked image was shared, started pushing for legislative and policy change after she saw her male classmates making fun of girls over the images. “I got super angry, and, like, enough was enough,” she told Vox in an email sent via her mother. “I stopped crying and decided to stand up for myself.” Supporters say the laws are necessary to keep students safe. But some experts who study technology and sexual abuse argue that they’re likely to be insufficient, since the criminal justice system has been so inefficient at rooting out other sex crimes. “It just feels like it’s going to be a symbolic gesture,” said Amy Hasinoff, a communications professor at the University of Colorado Denver who has studied image-based sexual abuse. She and others recommend tighter regulation of the apps themselves so the tools people use to make deepfake nudes are less accessible in the first place. “I am struggling to imagine a reason why these apps should exist’’ without some form of consent verification, Hasinoff said. Deepfake nudes are a new kind of sexual abuse So-called revenge porn — nude photos or videos shared without consent — has been a problem for years. But with deepfake technology, “anybody can just put a face into this app and get an image of somebody — friends, classmates, coworkers, whomever — completely without clothes,” said Britt Paris, an assistant professor of library and information science at Rutgers who has studied deepfakes. There’s no hard data on how many American high school students have experienced deepfake nude abuse, but one 2021 study conducted in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia found that 14 percent of respondents ages 16 to 64 had been victimized with deepfake imagery. Nude images shared without consent can be traumatic, whether they’re real or not. When she first found out about the deepfakes at her school, “I was in the counselor’s office, emotional and crying,” Mani said. “I couldn’t believe I was one of the victims.” When sexual images of students are shared around school, they can experience “shaming and blaming and stigmatization,” thanks to stereotypes that denigrate girls and women, especially, for being or appearing to be sexually active, Hasinoff said. That’s the case even if the images are fake because other students may not be able to tell the difference. Moreover, fake images can follow people throughout their lives, causing real harm. “These images put these young women at risk of being barred from future employment opportunities and also make them vulnerable to physical violence if they are recognized,” Yeshi Milner, founder of the nonprofit Data for Black Lives, told Vox in an email. Stopping deepfake abuse may require reckoning with AI To combat the problem, at least nine states have passed or updated laws targeting deepfake nude images in some way, and many others are considering them. In Louisiana, for example, anyone who creates or distributes deepfakes of minors can be sentenced to five or more years in prison. Washington’s new law, which takes effect in June, treats a first offense as a misdemeanor. The federal bill, first introduced in 2023, would give victims or parents the ability to sue perpetrators for damages, in addition to imposing criminal penalties. It has not yet received a vote in Congress but has attracted bipartisan support. However, some experts worry that the laws, while potentially helpful as a statement of values, won’t do much to fix the problem. “We don’t have a legal system that can handle sexual abuse,” Hasinoff said, noting that only a small percentage of people who commit sexual violence are ever charged. “There’s no reason to think that this image-based abuse stuff is any different.” Some states have tried to address the problem by updating their existing laws on child sexual abuse images and videos to include deepfakes. While this might not eliminate the images, it would close some loopholes. (In one recent New Jersey lawsuit, lawyers for a male high school student argued he should not be barred from sharing deepfaked photos of a classmate because federal laws were not designed to apply “to computer-generated synthetic images.”) Meanwhile, some lawyers and legal scholars say that the way to really stop deepfake abuse is to target the apps that make it possible. Lawmakers could regulate app stores to bar them from carrying nudification apps without clear consent provisions, Hasinoff said. Apple and Google have already removed several apps that offered deepfake nudes from the App Store and Google Play. However, users don’t need a specific app to make nonconsensual nude images; many AI image generators could potentially be used in this way. Legislators could require developers to put guardrails in place to make it harder for users to generate nonconsensual nude images, Paris said. But that would require challenging the “unchecked ethos” of AI today, in which developers are allowed to release products to the public first and figure out the consequences later, she said. “Until companies can be held accountable for the types of harms they produce,” Paris said, “I don’t see a whole lot changing.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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When I was a kid, my best friend’s mother had a habit of singing arias to her houseplants. I did not know this at the time, but she was likely under the influence of The Secret Life of Plants, a 1973 best seller that claimed, among many other things, that plants enjoy classical music more than rock and practice a form of telepathy. Thanks to these nonsense claims, mainstream botany mostly avoided the debate of whether plants can, in any way, be considered intelligent. But recently, some scientists have begun to devise experiments that break down elements of this big, broad question: Can plants be said to hear? Sense touch? Communicate? Make decisions? Recognize kin?In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to staff writer Zoë Schlanger, author of the upcoming The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. How could a thing without a brain be considered intelligent? Should we expand our definition of intelligence to include such an alien variety of it? And if we do, how will that change us? Schlanger has spoken with dozens of botanists, from the most renegade to the most cautious, and she reports back on the state of the revolution in thinking.Listen to the conversation here:Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsThe following is a transcript of the episode:Hanna Rosin: Okay, so, you have a glowing petunia?Zoë Schlanger: It was very thrilling to me because I got the first full-size petunia ever. I beat the influencers. I got it like three weeks early, organized a little exclusive on the petunia.And the scientist who crafted the technology that made this possible hand delivered it to our offices in New York.And so I just met him on the sidewalk, and I rushed up to our office, to the darkest part of our office, with this plant, which is the podcast recording studio, and turned out all the lights and waited, and then slowly my eyes adjusted.It does take a minute for your eyes to, you know—our eyes are like cameras. The aperture has to sort of open to take in that low level of light. But once it did, you know—stunning experience to suddenly see your first glowing plant outside of a lab.[Music]Rosin: This is staff writer Zoë Schlanger. And what she’s describing is a real plant, the first commercially available houseplant that glows in the dark.Schlanger: It glows in this very subdued, sort of matte way. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s a bit like moonlight. It’s very contained. You really have the sense that it’s glowing from within.Rosin: Which, technically, it is. Scientists, including the one who delivered that plant to Zoë, borrowed a cluster of five genes—some from a bioluminescent fungus—and these genes somehow reroute the plant’s metabolism through a process that emits light.The company that developed the plants sold out of their first run of 50,000 petunias. Probably, many of those will show up on your favorite Instagram feeds any minute. But Zoë wasn’t doing it for the ’Gram. She’s interested because she believes that the glowing petunias offer the first chance at breaking through a deep human bias.Schlanger: I’m really interested in the ways that we, culturally, don’t really perceive plants as having as much vitality, let’s say, as animals.To suddenly have this product available, where if people are clued into the fact that they’re looking at the plant’s metabolism activating when they see that glow, it kind of brings them into this realm of livingness in our minds.You’re really seeing the plant being alive. It’s very much its livingness.[Music]Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And I’m here today to tell you that your houseplant is not just alive but thinking—maybe. In her new book, The Light Eaters, Zoë Schlanger documents a revolution in the world of botany. Scientists—and these are respectable, academic scientists—are starting to ask themselves questions like: Can plants hear? Do they talk to each other? Are they intelligent?Now, The Atlantic does not have a full-time plant reporter. Zoë’s actual beat for years has been climate change. But she was getting tired of the doom and gloom.[Music]Schlanger: As anyone who reads climate change news knows, it’s harrowing, and as a reporter, I was just sort of getting numb to this material.Rosin: So Zoë went out looking for something that gave her the opposite of that feeling. And she found her thrill in—Schlanger: Botany journals.Rosin: Botany journals, which were, at this moment in history, so alive with a radical question.Schlanger: Plant scientists were debating openly in journals about whether or not plants could be considered intelligent.Rosin: Like, they were using the word intelligent?Schlanger: Yes. There had been a few kind of rabble-rousing scientists who had formed an alliance to try and push this idea into the fore of their field. And because of that, there was a discussion of whether or not neurobiology could be altered as a field to apply to plants.Rosin: Whoa. Okay. I have a loose sense that in the ’60s, there was a mushy idea that you could play music to your plants or that somehow you could communicate with your plants, and then there was some spirituality. But it wasn’t serious.Schlanger: Totally. You are talking about an era in which a book called The Secret Life of Plants came out. That was more like ’73, but it was sort of bubbling up through the culture up until that point. And this book was full of that sort of a thing. It is one of the reasons people started talking to their plants, and it contained the claim that plants enjoy classical music more than rock and roll.Rosin: Of course. Of course. Like babies. Like, everybody loves Beethoven.Schlanger: Exactly. Makes them smarter. And it included a CIA agent who strapped a lie-detector test to his houseplant and then thought about burning it. And he says that his thoughts made the plant’s lie-detector test kind of go wild, suggesting it was reading his mind.Rosin: Ooh. Okay.Schlanger: This book was so popular. For the first time, botany had a pop-science book that captivated people—perfect for the new-age moment. But the problem was a lot of it was just not true.Rosin: So it probably discredited the whole field of: Are plants intelligent?Schlanger: It did. It made all of the institutions that fund this kind of science kind of clam up and get nervous and stop funding it.Rosin: Uh-huh.Schlanger: But, for sure, in the last 15 years, technology has come up so far that they are able to confirm things they had never previously been able to in the Secret Life of Plants era.Rosin: And what are the kinds of things that are being debated?Schlanger: The main debate is: Are plants behaving intentionally? Are plants behaving at all? Can they be said to behave when something doesn’t have a mind? You get into all these murky discussions of what intelligence really means.If intelligence means responding in a way that has a good future outcome, then there’s probably a good argument for that.But does intelligence mean a sort of more academic awareness of events and this more mushy quality of consciousness? Then you get into stranger territory.And, science is a very conservative institution. Scientists don’t want to be using words that they can’t precisely define.So this caused a lot of fights and is still causing fights. Nobody can quite decide how to refer to plants.Rosin: So now, basically, plants are in this large, maybe post-Biblical-era debate about what else besides us could be said to be intelligent—like primates, dolphins, whales, pigs—that we’re used to. And maybe plants has now entered the legitimate realm of those discussions, rather than the far-out-there realm.Schlanger: Yeah, plants have entered the consciousness chat, for sure.Rosin: Oh my God, the consciousness chat.[Music]Schlanger: It’s very hard to make some of these plant-science findings tangible. The idea that, let’s say, a plant makes decisions or is communicating with airborne chemicals—you can’t see any of that.Rosin: So what’s the first, say, surprising thing that your eyes were opened to once you started to look into it? Like, an ability or a skill or a thing that a plant could do that you didn’t know about before?Schlanger: One of the biggest things was, I didn’t realize that plants could feel me touching them.That was a big one. I, you know, pet my houseplants all the time.Rosin: You do?Schlanger: Yeah, you know, fresh leaves that have just come out—they’re really soft. It’s lovely. But now I think about that twice because I realize that there are sensors.No one’s quite sure of the mechanics of this, but the plant has an ability to sense that touch and treat it like an assault. It might amp up its immune system to respond to that. It might change its growth pattern.Rosin: Uh-huh.Schlanger: From what we now know, many plants will ramp up their defenses when they’re touched too many times. That ultimately might mean a tougher exterior, a more flexible stem, or just an invisible cascade of chemicals to prevent infection.[Music]Rosin: So plants can sense touch, which isn’t intelligence in the same way that, say, writing a great book about plants is intelligence, but it is an element of intelligence—something like using one of your senses to make a decision. So let’s try another sense-related intelligence question: Do plants hear?[Music]Rosin: All right. So let’s get into one of the experiments. We’re going to listen to a sound here. I’m sorry, podcast people. This is a sound that people listening to shows hate, but here we go.[Caterpillar audio]Rosin: I actually think it’s kind of beautiful.Schlanger: Mm-hmm.Rosin: All right. What is that? What are we listening to?Schlanger: You are listening to the delicious noises of a cabbage white caterpillar chewing on a leaf. This recording was taken by these two researchers named Rex Cocroft and Heidi Appel, and they study the world of phytoacoustics, or the way that plants respond to sound.Rosin: Now, mind you, this isn’t an actual caterpillar chewing on an actual leaf. It’s a recording being played back to the plant.Schlanger: So they recorded these caterpillars chewing and clipped little guitar pickups to the same plants. And these pickups vibrate the leaf at the same frequency, amplitude that the caterpillar’s mouth chewing the leaf would. And what they wanted to know was, would a plant respond to just the noise of their predator eating them, even if they weren’t really being eaten?Rosin: Right. So not the smell or not the sensation of the caterpillar there, but just purely the sound.Schlanger: Exactly. Because we already know other plants will detect the saliva of a caterpillar and respond. But they just really want to know, what is the role of sound in a plant’s life?To their shock, honestly, the plants reacted by priming their chemical-defense systems. So when the researchers brought in real caterpillars, they were ready for them. They produced all these pesticides. They made their leaves unappetizing.Rosin: Okay. I want to elaborate on how wild that is, because what do you mean the plant is listening to an acoustic recreation, amplification of a caterpillar? Like, how?Schlanger: It’s astonishing to me too. The “how” of this is that sound is vibration.Rosin: Ah.Schlanger: So vibration is a physical stimulus. It’s a physical thing that the plant is encountering, which is kind of like how the hairs in our ears work. You know, they get hit by sound waves, and the hairs in our ears vibrate. And then that sends a message to our brain, and we perceive that as a sound.Rosin: I can see the philosophical problem now. Because as you first started talking, the plant is vibrating—I’m thinking, Okay, it’s just reflex. Like, once you say that, it seems like no big deal. But then once you explain how we hear, then it doesn’t seem vastly different, except I guess you don’t have the brain to transmit the signal through. So that is different.Schlanger: And that’s the boiling-hot core of the entire plant-science debate: How does the plant respond when there’s no centralized place for all these signals to go? How do you do this without a brain?Rosin: I see. That then leads to the question of: Can you have intelligence, consciousness, decision-making without a brain?Schlanger: Exactly. That gets into questions like: Is network intelligence possible? Do you need the signals to go to a centralized place, or can we accept a sort of more diffuse, whole-body awareness in the way that we think about a computer network?Rosin: Okay. After the break, now that we’ve gotten to the core of it, I make Zoë go through a lightning round of questions.Rosin: Do plants communicate with each other?Do plants recognize their relatives?This one is crazy: Do plants have personalities?Rosin: And then we figure out: What are we supposed to do with all this expanding knowledge about plants? Never walk in a grassy field again? That’s coming up.[Music]Rosin: Okay, this is a lightning round of questions, but I want you to answer at the speed of plants—not necessarily quickly, because they’re big and interesting questions.Do plants communicate with each other?Schlanger: Plants do have ways of communicating with each other. They’re able to synthesize all these incredibly specific chemicals in their bodies to match different conditions. And then they project them out via their pores. And then other plants take them up via these little pores. They have these pores on the backs of their leaves that look like little fish lips. It’s very funny under a microscope. And that contains some information.So if a plant is being eaten by caterpillars, it will synthesize a chemical that then alerts other plants to sort of up their defenses before the caterpillar or pest or whatever even reaches them.And there’s some really interesting research coming out now around regional “dialects” in plants, which blows my mind. These researchers have found that fields of isolated plants can have what they’re calling regional dialects that are specific to that single field that’s a more specific version of the general, more universal language of that species.Rosin: And when you say “dialects,” you mean they’re communicating with slight variations of a chemical, right? It’s not like, you know, they have different French accents or something.Schlanger: Right. It’s a regional variation of how they use chemicals to send signals, although the term dialect is actually how the researchers themselves describe it.Rosin: Okay, another wild question: Do plants recognize their relatives?Schlanger: So kin recognition in plants is a fascinating field. It’s a very muddy field. We have parsed very little of this so far.But we do know that sunflowers, for example—the traditional thinking with sunflowers is that you have to plant them quite far apart because otherwise they compete for resources so much that they try and shade each other out, so you end up with fewer sunflower seeds, which is not what sunflower farmers want. But certain research has found that when you place sunflowers with their genetic siblings, you can actually pack them so tightly because they will angle their stems to avoid shading each other.Rosin: (Gasps.) You mean they don’t steal resources from their relatives? They, like, protect their own?Schlanger: Exactly.Rosin: That’s crazy.Schlanger: And there’s clear evolutionary theory around this for higher animals, but we had not yet considered that for plants.Rosin: So that’s, like, widely accepted?Schlanger: Well, I wouldn’t say widely. (Laughs.) The caveats in this whole field are just unbelievable. But it’s also only been something that people have been considering for about 10 years, so it’s probably going to take another 20 before everyone’s like, Here’s how this works exactly.Rosin: Okay, this one is crazy: Do plants have personalities?Schlanger: So there’s some limited research emerging about variations in plant behavior and whether those variations do amount to a kind of personality.We’re used to scientists studying what you might call personality in animals, where an individual animal is more quote-unquote “shy” or more quote-unquote “bold” than other members of their species. But one researcher has applied that framing to plants and found what he believes are similar variations there.There’s some evidence to say that some plants are something like The Boy who Cried Wolf. They’ll kind of signal wildly at the slightest disturbance. And other plants are more reticent to do that. They’ll kind of wait for the disturbance to be really bad—for the pests to be really bothering them—before they let out their kind of distress call that alerts other plants to there being some kind of pest invasion.Rosin: You know, the way you’re talking about plants—it really sounds like how we talk about people, like how people make decisions. Is it fair to call how some plants interact with the world decision-making?Schlanger: So this is where I’d remind everyone that this is still a very new and very hotly debated area of science, especially when it comes to the language we use. And it’s easy to get into trouble when the language might make it sound like plants are people or plants have minds. They aren’t, and they don’t.But what I will say is that after spending all this time with the research, there’s a lot of plant behavior that looks a lot like decision-making. Often these are very, very simple decisions, like, input: There’s water over there. Output: Let’s grow towards it. But it also shows how much we don’t know. For instance, we know some plants are capable of storing information and then acting based on that information later.Or, you know, in some instances, plants can count and then choose to do an action based on a certain number of things. There’s a classic example that people call the memory of winter—that a plant needs to have a certain number of days of cold for it to then bloom in the spring.Rosin: But why isn’t it just responding to sensations? Like, if we’re talking about the difference between reflex and intention, which is how I’m thinking about it, is it just a reflex? There’s heat, you know. It’s stored a certain amount of sunlight. I’m not sure what the reflex would be in response to, as opposed to the word you used, which was counting.Schlanger: It comes down to a question of how far you need to distance what a plant is doing from what ourselves might be doing. There’s another example of counting plants in a Venus flytrap: They have all of these little hairs in their maw, in the leaves that snap closed, and it’s not enough for a little pebble to fall into that trap. It won’t close on a pebble. It needs multiple of those little hairs, those little trigger hairs touched. So it has to be a squirming animal that falls in there for the plant to bother closing. So it counts to at least five in that case.[Watch ticking sound]Schlanger: And then it counts time elapsed. If 30 seconds pass, and it doesn’t feel more movement, it’ll reset. But if the animal in there keeps moving, then they’re sure that they have a little fly or something, and digestion begins.Rosin: Right.Schlanger: And it tracks all this movement by counting how many hairs are triggered and over what amount of time. So that’s kind of math at another level that requires storage and addition in some ways.Rosin: Okay, so I’m asking you this now straightforwardly: Are plants intelligent?Schlanger: I, at this point, would say that they are, with the caveat that I came to this with a lot of skepticism of that perspective.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Schlanger: I’ve seen enough to feel like all of the hedging that people do around this is maybe a bit overblown. And the most important thing is that they’re not intelligent in the way we expect ourselves to be intelligent.We’re dealing with an alien life form in a lot of ways. You wouldn’t expect aliens to have developed intelligence through the same routes as we did. But if we can expand our brains to sort of eliminate this human, academic version of intelligence, there’s no doubt they’re making choices for themselves.And they’re doing that despite everything coming at them. They’re dealing with a very complicated, continually changing environment, and they’re spontaneously reacting to rise to the occasion.Rosin: But, okay, so what does it matter? Like, we’re having a mini debate here about intelligence and maybe consciousness and decision-making and reflex. Like, it could be just semantics, so we’re arguing over definitions, but if we decide it’s reflexive, then what? And if we decide it’s a decision, then what?Schlanger: If we decide this is all reflexive, then we all continue how the culture has always continued. That just regards plants as quasi-living, not particularly sentient, capable of interesting things, but ultimately closer to a rock an animal—closer to a rock than, like, a whale or something.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Schlanger: But if we decide that there’s some element of subjectivity in a plant, that starts to put them in a different category. I mean, it all is about how human culture responds to them.So, we draw these kind of lines in the sand between animals and plants. And then within animals, we draw lines in the sand between intelligent animals and dumb animals. And, you know, it seems like every year we start admitting new animals into this category of creatures we consider intelligent or conscious—I mean, dogs and dolphins. And, you know, it’s been only a decade or so since we’ve accepted those things as conscious.But in the last couple of years, we’re understanding that bees can, you know, have elaborate communication styles. They have this waggle dance that tells their hive mates where there’s good food sources, or they can actually detect different styles of art if they’re shown enough of the same pictures.So how much farther down that ladder do you look in a way? What’s, like, past insects?Rosin: Mm-hmm.Schlanger: What happens if we include plants in those categories? That opens up a lot of moral considerations. And then you have the potential for something like what we’ve seen with animal-rights movements.It brings up the question of what happens if we have a plant-rights movement, which is actually something that legal experts are writing and thinking about right now. It introduces this interesting idea: What do we do about the fact that we’re animals that need to eat plants? There’s just no way around that.Rosin: This seems like it really upends a lot of things that we just do routinely without thinking about it. Like, I was going to ask you: Do you still stroke your plants? I imagine you think twice about it now. That’s a small question.Then there’s the slightly bigger question of: When you put a plant in a pot in your house, is that the equivalent, or does that have some resonance with keeping an animal in a cage?And then I guess there’s the much bigger questions of, you know, broadly thinking about protecting plants on Earth.Schlanger: Yeah, it’s interesting you bring up the potted houseplant example. I have come to some amount of consternation around this because after I did a lot of research around plant communication and how plants interact with other organisms below ground, how their roots are hooked in with fungi and other microbes, and how there’s all this information being transferred below ground. And then I look over to my many houseplants sitting in their discrete pots.But I am soothed a bit because I’m looking at all these plants in my Brooklyn apartment, and they are all tropical varieties that have been raised in nurseries for probably generations.And when you raise a plant in optimal conditions for several generations, it loses its hardiness. These plants are not going to survive without us at this point, the ones in our houses.Rosin: (Laughs.) This seems like a dubious argument. This is like, this is a pet chinchilla that you bought that was raised in a, you know, from a family in a series of pet stores, and so—Schlanger: I mean, you know, it’s a bit like our dogs and cats. We’ve created these domesticated species, and now they need us. And that’s the situation.So that makes me feel better.Rosin: Okay, that’s good. I can bear it more with dogs and cats. Like, they do have a—well, dogs anyway—they do have a centuries-old mutual dependence.[Music]Rosin: Do you walk around now and see nature just vibrating? Like, how do you see the world differently than you did before you started this?Schlanger: I do walk into the park by my house very differently. I do have this new awareness that there’s all of this drama going on around me.Rosin: I feel like I’m going to have a hard time stepping on grass now.Schlanger: Yeah, they know you’re doing that, and they hate it. (Laughs.)Rosin: No, stop!Schlanger: But, I mean, caveat to the being worried about harming plants thing: We layer all of our human feelings onto this situation and all this new awareness we have about plants. The truth is plants are modular. They’re designed to lose a limb and be fine.You know, you cut grass; it grows right back. That’s not killing the organism. You can’t cut our arm off and it not have any consequences. But plants are designed to have this kind of diffuse, modular capacity to just grow a new arm.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Schlanger: But it does introduce this kind of sense of wonder, that plants are no longer a background decoration in my life. They’re no longer this kind of general wash of green. I’m really aware that there’s all these individuals. There’s all of these distinct species. There’s all of this biological creativity, all this kind of evolutionary nuance that is playing out all around me.You know, it has the effect of unseating us a little bit from this assumption that we’re sitting sort of on the top of the evolutionary heap.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Schlanger: Once you start to realize the incredible evolutionary fine-tuning that goes into plants, it kind shifts the ground beneath humanity to settle us a little more among other species, and it’s a humbling realization that I think our species could use a lot more of.[Music]Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

A sperm donor fathers more than 150 children. A cryobank misleads prospective parents about a donor’s stellar credentials and spotless health record. A cancer survivor’s eggs are stored in a glorified meat locker that malfunctions, ruining her chance at biological motherhood. A doctor implants a dozen embryos in a woman, inviting life-threatening complications. A clinic puts a couple’s embryos into the wrong woman—and the biological parents have no recourse.All of these things have happened in America. There’s no reason they won’t happen again.When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos are children, effectively banning in vitro fertilization, it produced an uproar. In response, the state legislature quickly granted IVF clinics sweeping immunity, regardless of what egregious errors they may make. This is the way the debate over assisted reproduction has typically played out in the United States: A vocal minority asserts that embryos are people and calls for total bans of reproductive technology; meanwhile, the industry goes unregulated, leaving prospective parents with few safeguards and even fewer options when things go wrong. Unconsidered are all the patients who want IVF to be legal and also want it to be regulated like any other medical practice.[Read: The people rooting for the end of IVF]People across the political spectrum should be concerned about how underregulated fertility care is. The stakes are high. An estimated 9 percent of American adults have used some form of assisted reproduction by the end of their childbearing years—including in vitro fertilization, intrauterine insemination, and donor gametes. One out of every 50 babies born in the United States was conceived via IVF. Many of the hundreds of thousands of people who show up at clinics each year are desperate; the tissues that they entrust to these clinics frequently represent their only hope of biological parenthood. In a country that claims to care about families, the dearth of regulation represents a failure that cuts across party lines.Kaitlyn Abdou spent $165,000 on IVF and never had a child. Although she experienced multiple miscarriages using artificial insemination and paid for an insurance plan with full fertility benefits, her insurer denied her coverage because, as a single, queer woman, she didn’t meet Massachusetts’s definition of infertility: a man and a woman who are unable to conceive after one year of trying. Like thousands of other Americans, Abdou fell through the cracks of inconsistent state-by-state mandates. So she sold her house to pay for the treatments.At the clinic, CNY Fertility, Abdou struggled to understand her options, because there were so many different potential add-ons to her treatment, many of which seemed to be backed by shaky science. Without large-scale studies and clinical best practices to consult, Abdou felt, like many patients, that the best medical information came from anecdotes in Facebook groups. After four months of doctor-ordered human-growth-hormone injections—a common tactic to try to improve egg quality, though not FDA-approved—Abdou’s right ovary burst during an egg retrieval. Despite the pain, the clinic sent Abdou home. She woke up in agony and then headed to the emergency room, where she learned that she was bleeding internally. “If I had slept through the night,” she told me, “I probably would have bled out and died.”At times, Abdou wondered if the lab had mishandled her embryos; when several blastocysts that had been developing well were suddenly not viable, Abdou couldn’t tell if the reason was chance or poor protocols. No one warned her that she might continue to lose one pregnancy after another: Over three years, she had five miscarriages before giving up. Her care team cited the importance of “staying positive.” But with each round of treatment, the clinic made more money. Abdou received no guidance about when to stop or information about how likely she was to succeed. (CNY Fertility did not respond to a request for comment.)After hearing horror stories from patients at other clinics, about freezers malfunctioning and doctors withholding basic information on embryo quality and ultrasound results, Abdou feels like her experience could have been far worse. “I was lucky,” she said.The U.S. fertility industry is unique in its lack of rules and oversight, compared with other countries and other fields of medicine. From the field’s inception, lawmakers have declined to regulate it. In the 1980s, anti-abortion conservatives blocked initial efforts at IVF regulation because of discomfort with the creation and destruction of embryos, as well as the perceived threat to morality posed by decoupling sex and reproduction. Although Democrats led the congressional hearings fighting for oversight, liberals also feared that restricting what could be done would limit who could access it, and would end up excluding single people and same-sex couples (who are, in fact, barred from accessing IVF in many other countries, including France, Italy, and China).Dov Fox, a reproductive-law professor at the University of San Diego and the author of Birth Rights and Wrongs, told me that Congress “just threw up their hands and said, ‘We’ll let the private sector sort it out.’”American consumers were left with the barest of federal rules—one law requiring testing donor sperm and eggs for sexually transmitted diseases, another requiring clinics to report their pregnancy and birth rates—with no penalties for noncompliance. Additionally, the FDA will not approve techniques that genetically modify embryos. In this vacuum, a patchwork of state statutes and case law developed, creating “a confusing legal tangle” for patients, according to Margaret Marsh, a professor at Rutgers University and a co-author of The Pursuit of Parenthood. For the most part, the industry is self-regulated by professional bodies that have no enforcement power, besides referring reckless doctors to state medical boards.Ironically, by opting out, the federal government played an enormous role in shaping the fertility industry and causing it to diverge from other medical specialties. In 1995, two Republican members of Congress added an appropriations-bill rider that banned federal funding of embryo research—a provision that still stands. In most medical fields, government grants get new treatments off the ground, which leads to rules, best practices, and data-collection guidelines meant to serve the public interest. In assisted reproduction, this is all absent. Wanda Ronner, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the other co-author of The Pursuit of Parenthood, told me, “We don’t even have independent, peer-reviewed research funded by the NIH to say ‘What’s the most effective way to make sure the embryo is okay to transfer?’ or even ‘What temperature to freeze the embryos?’ We don’t even have a lot of information on these fertility drugs and how they impact you.”Basic facts continue to elude researchers. “We do not even know how many frozen embryos we have in this country,” Marsh told me. The last count was performed 20 years ago and found 400,000. Today, “we have no idea.” Unlike new cancer drugs and novel surgeries, which go through multiple rounds of trials before receiving FDA approval, “a lot of innovation in fertility is clinical,” Sonia Suter, a law professor at George Washington University and a co-author of Reproductive Technologies and the Law, told me. Usually performed on small samples of patients, many of these experiments “don’t even require going through the research process.” This means patients like Abdou are left with sparse information about efficacy; instead, they are often test subjects themselves.Because of the federal research-funding ban, Fox told me, “assisted reproduction grew up less as a medical practice or research than as a business activity.”[Yuval Levin and O. Carter Snead: The real lessons of the Alabama IVF ruling]Ordinary safeguards are often absent. Every area of health care has so-called never events: catastrophic failures that are never supposed to happen, such as amputating the wrong limb or forgetting a scalpel inside a patient’s abdomen. The government requires hospitals to report these incidents—but no agency tracks reproductive disasters. Whereas donor blood is usually barcoded and drug storage frequently requires fingerprints to unlock, Fox points to multiple cases of egg and sperm banks labeling tissue with pen and paper.This lack of oversight extends into almost every aspect of assisted reproduction. The U.S. has no federal limits on how many times a man can donate sperm—leading to donors with hundreds of offspring and a rise in accidental incest between donor-conceived half-siblings. No one holds cryobanks responsible for the information that they provide customers. One bank promoted its most popular donor as a genius athlete with a Ph.D. and perfect health. In reality, he was a college dropout with a rap sheet. According to Fox, who produced a podcast about the case, “They know that nothing is going to be checked and that they can make more money if they lie.”Sex selection, banned in almost every other country, is big business in the United States. Genetic tests paired with IVF enable prospective parents to identify and implant either male or female embryos. This is illegal in Canada, Australia, and every European nation besides Cyprus, except in rare cases to avoid passing on X-chromosome-linked diseases. But in 2018, an estimated 75 percent of American clinics offered sex selection for nonmedical reasons, with the majority allowing people to undergo IVF solely to pick a son or a daughter—despite a 1999 condemnation from the professional body overseeing reproductive medicine. (It has since updated its position to a neutral stance.) Jeffrey Steinberg, a pioneer of the procedure who practices in California, estimates that trait selection comprises 5 to 10 percent of the American IVF market, or up to $90 million annually.New polygenic tests—which sequence embryos’ genomes and promise parents the ability to select those at the lowest risk for obesity, bipolar disorder, and other conditions—are attacked by critics as “Eugenics 2.0” yet are completely unregulated by the FDA. Most countries ban these tests, along with their marketing claims. But in the U.S., parents can use raw genetic data to pick embryos based on whatever criteria they want. They can even go online to find dubious advice about how to choose the smartest, tallest, most attractive offspring.Steinberg defended the status quo, telling me that regulation risks “putting the handcuffs on scientists.” He added, “If there’s anything society should have learned, it’s Keep their hands off of people’s reproductive choices.” Like many other fertility specialists, Steinberg uses the rhetoric of choice, borrowed from the abortion debate, to argue for loose regulations—a tactic that might backfire and imperil IVF as abortion restrictions mount across the nation.Despite its shortcomings, the U.S. fertility industry is booming. People travel from all over the world to get care here. Some seek services that are illegal elsewhere, such as sex selection, the purchase of donor gametes, and commercial surrogacy. Others can’t get care in their home country because they are single, queer, older, or ill.When negative outcomes arise, one could argue “that’s a price we’re willing to pay for a medicine of miracles that fills empty cribs and frees families of terrible diseases,” Fox said.No matter how hard clinics try, Steinberg said, mistakes are the cost of doing business. “Embryos are treated with the utmost respect, just like humans,” he told me. “But it’s never to say that a human doesn’t get sucked out of the window of an airplane or that an embryo doesn’t get dropped on the floor. It can happen. ... Life is life. Not everything will be absolutely perfect.”Reproductive technology can bring prospective parents great hope—which makes its failures especially brutal.Georgette Fleischer believes that she was the victim of fertility fraud. Fleischer quickly conceived her first child using donor gametes, but when she came back to give her six-month-old daughter a sibling with remaining gametes, New Hope Fertility Center, in New York, couldn’t produce a single viable embryo. According to a lawsuit Fleischer filed, New Hope denied her access to her medical records multiple times; when she finally got them, she learned that previously healthy sperm were now nearly all immotile or deformed. (The clinic created the embryos anyway, without informing Fleischer.)Eventually, Fleischer found a paper in the prestigious journal Fertility and Sterility published by the chief executive of New Hope, John Zhang, that documented his trials in freeze-drying and reconstituting sperm. The dates overlapped with Fleischer’s treatment, and the consequences resembled what had happened to her sperm, leading Fleischer to believe that Zhang had experimented on her tissue without asking her.“I was the perfect guinea pig,” Fleischer told me. She believes that she was targeted because she was an older single mother, reliant on both donor eggs and sperm. But even if Fleischer can prove that she was the victim of Zhang’s experimentation, only nine states have laws against experimenting on reproductive material without a patient’s consent. New York isn’t one of them.Fleischer reported Zhang to the FDA and the New York Department of Health, but she may never know the outcome. Her lawsuit laid out 12 claims; the judge dismissed all but medical malpractice and lack of informed consent. She’s appealing, claiming that the damage extends far beyond those narrow categories. But these cases are so hard to win, Fleischer told me, that she couldn’t find a lawyer and has had to represent herself. (In court filings, New Hope Fertility Center and Zhang denied Fleischer’s allegations; neither party responded to multiple requests for comment.)Fleischer exemplifies the vulnerability and desperation that many fertility patients feel, turning to technology when they can’t conceive because of age, cancer, risk of heritable diseases, sexual orientation, or lack of a partner. Clinical failures “leave those people who were already disadvantaged doubly or triply so,” Fox said.Marsh, the historian, told me that under the current system, “infertile people are being robbed.” A lack of clear information means that patients don’t know how to get the best care, scrambling while time runs out. Ronner, at Penn, said she and Marsh believe that reactionary, piecemeal approaches will only make things worse: “We worry that without clear national policies on assisted reproduction, access to IVF and control over embryos could become as difficult in many states as access to abortion already is.” She added that although IVF is available now, “that could change in a minute.”A decade ago, the CDC created an action plan for addressing infertility as a public-health issue; Ronner and Marsh point to its suggestions as a great place to start reform. They also advocate for creating a “distinctly American” version of the United Kingdom’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, an independent body that oversees both research and clinical care.[Read: The calendar of human fertility is changing]Most other industrialized nations provide, subsidize, or mandate insurance coverage of IVF, which gives them a strong incentive to regulate the industry. This could eventually happen in the U.S.; 21 states and the District of Columbia now require insurance to cover some infertility treatment. But even that assistance is uneven: Arkansas, one of the few states to explicitly mandate IVF coverage, restricts that mandate to heterosexual married couples only.Although abortion remains a controversial political issue, the response to the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling—and the state’s swift passage of a law to protect IVF—shows broad support for family-building technology. According to a recent CBS/YouGov poll, 86 percent of Americans believe that IVF should be legal. Perhaps the uproar in response to the Alabama decision provides an opportunity to protect patients and provide guardrails around the treatments that create much-wanted children, without leaving regulation to the whims of the marketplace or reactionary rulings.America already has a model for regulation: the military. Eight military hospitals provide IVF at about a quarter of the average cost. Security protocols are strict, according to Donald Royster, a retired Air Force colonel and former head of the military IVF center at San Antonio Military Medical Center. Expensive add-ons, including preimplantation genetic testing, are far less common, keeping costs down while dodging thorny ethical questions.Patients also need specific ways to seek relief when things go wrong, according to Fox. Legislation and jurisprudence should recognize the special status of eggs, embryos, and sperm, instead of pretending that they are “lost property or killed persons or a broken contract or even medical malpractice.”Failing to acknowledge this only politicizes and imperils fertility care. Patient safety, accurate advertising, and legal accountability should not be partisan issues.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has described our times as the “Age of Authenticity,” meaning an era when people are willing to publicize their secrets and indulge their urges, even if such a drive for personal truth involves transgressing traditional boundaries of self-control. Once, this type of exhibitionism was the preserve of a few celebrities, but now anybody can get in on the act: The quest for authenticity has spawned salacious memoirs, reality-TV shows of escalating disinhibition, and cathartic self-disclosure on social media.Such revelations are supposed to be good for us, because suppressing our thoughts and desires is considered unhealthy and unnatural. In psychology, this way of thinking is sometimes called self-determination theory, according to which we are happiest when we obey our inner drives.I would grant that living inauthentically and being repressed do not sound like a recipe for well-being. But the age of authenticity does not seem to have made us happier, either. Quite the reverse. Some scholars, such as Taylor and the historian and theologian Carl R. Trueman, have argued that American society has become far more expressively individualistic over the past few decades. Yet the average level of happiness has consistently fallen, even as reported levels of depression and anxiety have exploded.One possible explanation for this paradox is that the lowering of self-control was an understandable but significant error in our collective thinking, and it took us in exactly the wrong direction where happiness is concerned. Although understanding how this happened won’t turn our whole culture around, it can help you be happier in your own life.[Ed Yong: Self-control is just empathy with your future self]From a psychological perspective, a useful hypothesis of how self-management works is that two systems in the brain govern it: the behavioral activation system and the behavioral inhibition system. The first one excites the desire for rewards and other positive stimuli, and arouses your interest in doing things. The second one creates an aversion to punishment and negative consequences, and tells you not to do things.Generally, you can think about each system in this way: If the activation system rises or the inhibition system falls, self-control may decrease. Alternatively, if the inhibition system rises or the activation system falls, self-control may increase. And what works for an individual also scales by analogy for the group or community.So which combination makes us happier overall—more of the behavioral activation system and less of the behavioral inhibition system, or the other way around? The answer is that both combinations are effective. A team of eight psychologists showed this in a 2018 study on self-control in the Journal of Personality. The team fielded a series of undergraduate surveys. The researchers found that low levels of self-control were associated with the lowest levels of subjective well-being. Moving to a higher level of self-control increased the undergraduates’ happiness.Interestingly, in a separate study within the paper, the researchers also found that low-to-moderate levels of self-control—that is, a slightly below-average level of self-control—were associated with the lowest levels of momentary well-being. Yet a complete lack of self-control was associated with slightly higher momentary well-being. This is no wonder: Letting completely loose is commonly associated with very short-term bouts of pleasure.This implies that if you are a somewhat reserved, self-controlled person, you can raise your sense of well-being in one of two completely contrasting ways: by being more authentic and impulsive or by being more punctilious and modest. Given that choice, the former sounds a lot more fun. The idea that most people would choose disinhibition and that authenticity would become the spirit of the age makes intuitive sense.[Arthur C. Brooks: The link between self-reliance and well-being]The trouble is that the let-it-all-hang-out approach is restricted to momentary well-being, and has consequences for others. In 2011, scholars at Arizona State University studied the correlation of low self-control with irresponsible behavior that makes life worse for others. They found that low self-control, although potentially enjoyable to the one shedding inhibitions, is associated with criminal offending, academic fraud, binge drinking, drunk dialing, public profanity, and (weirdly) public flatulence. All of these behaviors have negative social consequences, some more serious than others, but any will affect the well-being of others.I would hazard this as a partial explanation at least for our national happiness funk: American culture has gone the wrong way about getting happier—by encouraging each of us to relax self-control to get happier, the unfortunate result is that we have become unhappier as a whole, and are now stuck that way. By seeking the short-term mood payoff that comes from disinhibition, we have become unapologetic, drunk-dialing, cussing, farting fraudsters who make one another miserable.That is a broad statement, and not intended to be taken literally. But if you think the characterization is preposterously extreme, have you looked at your social-media feed lately?For your own well-being, and everyone’s, increasing self-control might be much better than lowering it. To propose this at a societal level is nothing new; writers have been doing so for centuries. Benjamin Franklin, for example, exhorted “all well-bred people” to “forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.” But he had a broader vision, too, for how to realize greater collective happiness. “Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will,” he advised, “and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.”[Conor Friedersdorf: The case for restraint in all things]As Franklin suggests and the aforementioned research shows, even if others don’t mend their ways, controlling yourself more is a strategy that will raise your individual well-being. It can be hard to go against unfortunate social trends, so here are a couple of helpful things to keep in mind.First, be aware of the forces around you that may lower the activity of the inhibition system in your brain and thus push you toward lower self-control. According to scholars at the University of Toronto and Northwestern University, three bad influences to watch out for are excess alcohol, anonymity, and social power. None of these necessarily leads to antisocial behavior, but they easily can—and so take you in the wrong direction for happiness. (For instance, have you ever come across someone who’s happy to have said or done something drunk that they would have been embarrassed to say or do sober?)Similarly, who expects to find people being their best, most magnanimous selves when posting anonymously on social media? In fact, scholars who have studied anonymity on social media have found that although most users behave benignly, a small subset may demonstrate antisocial, even psychopathic, behavior. If you’re seeking to boost your self-control, shun any social media forum where your identity is hidden. Instead, accept responsibility for everything you say.Social power—meaning, your capacity to influence others—is a trickier subject. If you possess, say, an ability to publish material that many other people will read, see, or hear, you should ask yourself whether your desire to attract and retain an audience is leading you to abandon your privacy. Does what you reveal about yourself evoke in people a frisson of interest but also lead them to hold a low opinion of your taste and manners? How much better to err on the side of self-control.And consider the social influence we invest in leaders. We reduce our own well-being when we hand power to vulgarians. Just as it feels freeing to shed self-control but ultimately leads to negative consequences, so following leaders who act without constraints and break norms might feed our id but inevitably takes us individually and collectively down a dark path.[Read: The paradox of effort]You might think that because I am arguing that the happiest path is one in which we sublimate our true feelings and desires through greater self-control, I am advocating in effect for inauthenticity. But that’s not my intention; rather, I am arguing for authentic self-improvement. The choice to act in a particular way boils down to a choice of who we will be as people—the famous “As If Principle” in psychology shows that we become a certain way by acting as if you already are that way.This is what Aristotle meant when he wrote that “virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions.” One important choice we have is to behave with either controlled grace or uncontrolled entitlement. Neither option is in reality more authentic than the other because, in becoming who we are through our choices, both paths are equally authentic; both embody who we’ve chosen to be as people. But only one path, that of controlled grace, leads to greater happiness for one and all. So the beautiful truth is that we can elect to become authentically better than we were—and happier to boot.

I had been avoiding my friend Jens Söring for months. Whenever his emails arrived, I’d open a reply window and stare with dread at the blinking cursor. I no longer knew what to say to him, this man who had spent 33 years in prison for a double homicide he swore he didn’t commit.Jens had been convicted of murder in 1990. I had been convicted of murder nearly 20 years later. But the parallels between our cases were striking. While studying abroad in Italy in 2007, I had been accused of killing my roommate Meredith Kercher with the help of a man I’d been dating for just a week. Jens, too, had been studying abroad—he was a German citizen attending the University of Virginia—and he, too, had been accused of a brutal killing, allegedly with the help of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom. The murder weapon in both cases was a knife. Elizabeth had been portrayed in the media as a psychologically disturbed femme fatale; I’d been called “Luciferina” in the courtroom and “Foxy Knoxy” in the tabloids. Both of our cases involved a confession obtained without legal counsel present. And in both of our cases, biological evidence played an important role. I was freed only after independent experts debunked the supposed DNA evidence linking me to the crime. DNA analysis wasn’t available when Jens was tried—but applied decades later, it could be interpreted to support his claim of innocence. For a long time, I believed the major difference between Jens’s case and mine was this: I eventually got justice.In 2015, eight years after being arrested, I was definitively acquitted of the murder of Meredith Kercher by Italy’s highest court per non aver commesso il fatto—“for not having committed the act.” A man named Rudy Guede had already been identified as the killer, and had been convicted. I spoke with Jens for the first time a few years later, in 2019, through the prison phone system at Buckingham Correctional Center, in rural Virginia. By then, as a writer and podcaster, I had become an advocate for the wrongly convicted. Jens had already been imprisoned for 33 years—longer than I’d been alive. He would die in prison, if the Commonwealth of Virginia had its way.After talking with lawyers and advocates, impartial experts, and Jens himself, I had come to believe that Jens was innocent of murder, though he had admittedly, and foolishly, helped cover up murders in their aftermath. I publicly advocated for his release. And I offered him advice and served as a bridge to the community of wrongly convicted people in the United States and abroad, a community that had been essential to my own mental health. In our many exchanges, Jens came across as intelligent, bookish, and quick to laugh, but with a deep melancholy beneath the surface, an emotion I knew all too well. Listening to his voice, I often felt as if I were peering through a looking glass into another, sadder dimension. He seemed to me like a tragic version of myself. Our bond was more than a friendship; it was a kind of kinship.[Amanda Knox: Who owns Amanda Knox?]But now, armed with new information, I believed there was a strong possibility that Jens had been lying to me from the very beginning. I wrote the email, explaining the doubts I had. Jens was angry. “Let me say this quite bluntly,” he replied, in what would prove to be our last communication. “There is way more DNA evidence incriminating you than there is me … I mean, Amanda, WTF.”Derek and Nancy Haysom were murdered in their home outside Lynchburg, Virginia, on March 30, 1985. The Haysoms were wealthy—Nancy was an artist whose family was related to the Astors; Derek, who was born in South Africa and eventually moved to Canada, had made money in steel and finance. A Bedford County detective named Chuck Reid described the crime scene as a “slaughterhouse.” Derek, in particular, had put up a fight, and had been stabbed 36 times. Both he and Nancy had had their throats cut so deeply that they were nearly decapitated. The crime shocked the local community and quickly became a media sensation. The investigators wondered at first whether this had been a Manson Family–style “thrill kill,” but eventually came to the view that the excessive violence suggested someone with a personal motive. This aligned with evidence that the killer was someone whom the Haysoms had welcomed into their home. They had been eating dinner, and their plates were still on the table. Nancy was wearing a housecoat. There were no signs of forced entry. Nothing had been stolen. Detectives interviewed roughly 100 people in the months following the murders, and only in the fall did they become suspicious of the Haysoms’ daughter, Elizabeth, and her boyfriend, Jens Söring.Both were promising young students at UVA. Jens, the son of a German diplomat, was a Jefferson Scholar. Elizabeth had been educated at boarding schools in Europe. Their relationship had begun the previous fall. Jens and Elizabeth hardly seemed like the kind of people who would commit a double homicide. In any case, the pair had an alibi—they’d been in Washington, D.C., on the weekend of the murders. They had hotel receipts and movie-ticket stubs to prove it, along with a rental-car agreement.But a Bedford County investigator named Ricky Gardner took a closer look at that last item, and noticed a discrepancy in the mileage—429 miles beyond the distance from Charlottesville, where the car had been rented, to D.C. and back. Those excess miles would account for an additional round trip between Washington and the Haysom residence. Elizabeth and Jens offered an explanation for the excess mileage—getting lost—but its vagueness and implausibility invited further scrutiny; the drive from Charlottesville to D.C. is a straight shot on U.S. Route 29. Finally, in late September, the detectives asked Elizabeth to submit fingerprints, footprints, and blood samples, which she provided. A few weeks later, facing the same request, Jens declined. Not long after, both fled the country, on separate flights.Seven months passed before a young couple, Christopher and Tara Lucy Noe, were detained in London at a Marks & Spencer department store, on suspicion of fraud. An in-house detective had witnessed them entering together with shopping bags, acting as if they didn’t know each other while inside, returning merchandise for cash, buying more clothes with checks at different registers, and then meeting up again out front. A call was made to Scotland Yard. Detectives Kenneth Beever and Terry Wright questioned the couple and obtained permission to search their apartment, which yielded evidence of a sophisticated check-fraud operation, together with wigs and other disguises. Authentic passports revealed the couple’s true identities: Jens Söring and Elizabeth Haysom. Detectives also found a large cache of letters the couple had written to each other and a joint travel diary that the pair had been keeping, which indicated that Jens and Elizabeth had been scamming their way across the globe, from Luxembourg to Thailand to the United Kingdom, using false IDs. More intriguing were references to a possible murder and the wiping of fingerprints. There was also a mention of “officers Reid and Gardner” in a place called Bedford.When asked about this, Jens at first claimed that the diary entries were ideas for a crime novel he was writing. But after a painstaking search of the many American towns named Bedford—this was in the pre-internet era—Detective Wright located Ricky Gardner in Virginia, and learned that Jens and Elizabeth were wanted in connection with the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom. Shortly thereafter, Jens confessed to the murders in multiple official interviews over the course of four days, giving a detailed account of how he had killed Elizabeth’s parents. The information relayed in his confessions corresponded with many aspects of the crime scene.Elizabeth confessed separately to participation in the murder scheme, admitting that she harbored a deep animosity toward her parents because of their controlling behavior and their disapproval of Jens. She said that she had planned the murders with him. According to her story, she had stayed in a hotel in Washington to help Jens fake an alibi, and he had driven to Lynchburg, killed the Haysoms, and then returned to the hotel. “It was my will that made him kill my parents,” she told the detectives, “and he wouldn’t have done it, I’m sure, if he hadn’t loved me so much and I he.”Elizabeth did not fight extradition, and in 1987, charged with two counts of accessory before the fact to capital murder, she pleaded guilty, forgoing a trial. During her sentencing hearing, Elizabeth condemned Jens as the killer and downplayed her own role in planning the crime. Any talk of killing her parents, she testified, had been merely “grotesque, childish fantasies”; she had failed to realize that Jens was taking the idea far more seriously. This claim was inconsistent with Elizabeth’s prior statements during interviews with detectives in London. Prosecutor James Updike’s cross-examination dug into this inconsistency, and by citing passages from her letters, he was able to damage her credibility, arguing that her original statements were truthful and that this new gloss was an attempt to lessen her culpability. Ultimately, Elizabeth was given two consecutive 45-year prison sentences for her role in the murder of her parents.Jens fought extradition, leading to a determination by the European Court of Human Rights, in 1989, that the potentially lengthy process of awaiting execution in the United States, were Jens to be convicted and sentenced to death, would violate Article III of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits inhumane and degrading treatment. Jens was extradited to Virginia only after the state agreed that it would not seek the death penalty.Jens stood trial in 1990, and to everyone’s surprise he pleaded not guilty. Hadn’t he already confessed? Yes, he said, but only because he had been trying to save Elizabeth from the death penalty by taking the blame himself—hoping that his status as a diplomat’s son would yield a relatively brief sentence as a youth offender in Germany. It was Elizabeth who had committed the murders, he now maintained. He had stayed behind in the hotel, thinking he was providing her with an alibi while she delivered a shipment of drugs—a long story involving a debt she supposedly owed to some dealers. Only later, he said, did he learn that she had killed her parents.In Jens’s telling, he was noble but naive, willing to risk prison time to save Elizabeth’s life. Could he really have been so in love that he’d help cover up a murder, lie to the police, flee the country, and then confess in her stead? His story was supported by the diagnoses of two psychiatrists who’d examined both Jens and Elizabeth while the pair were in custody in London. Elizabeth was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder; Jens was diagnosed with what his psychiatrists called folie à deux, now commonly known as shared psychosis, a rare disorder in which delusional beliefs are transferred from one person to another in a close relationship. And Elizabeth was the older and more sophisticated of the two.Updike, the prosecutor, made a case against Jens based on many pieces of evidence: the excess rental-car mileage; those diary entries and especially the letters, which revealed a deep hatred of the Haysoms, fantasies about their deaths, and hopes for an inheritance; Elizabeth’s testimony against Jens; and, of course, Jens’s multiple confessions.And Updike had something else. Although DNA analysis was not yet in use at the time, technicians had collected dozens of samples from bloodstains at the crime scene. Serology tests revealed that many of the samples tested as type A, a number of them tested as type AB, and two tested as type O. Derek Haysom had type A blood, and Nancy Haysom had type AB blood. Was it possible that the killer had been injured in the attack and left behind some of his or her own type O blood? The only suspect with type O blood was Jens Söring.The defense countered that 45 percent of the population has type O blood, but neither that nor the folie à deux defense was enough to sway the jury. After only four hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Jens of two counts of first-degree murder. He was given two consecutive life sentences. Left: Elizabeth Haysom, 1987. Right: Jens Söring, 1990. (Dan Doughtie / AP; Sundance Selects) Jens appealed his conviction multiple times between 1990 and 1998, and the state courts ruled against him every time. Jens then appealed in a federal court, claiming that he had received ineffective assistance of counsel and that crucial evidence had not been shared with him during his trial. In 2000, the federal court also ruled against him. Eventually Jens appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear his case.With that, his routes to freedom were closed, save for a pardon or parole, both of which were unlikely. But alongside his legal efforts, Jens had also been making literary ones. In 1995, with the help of a friend on the outside, he self-published an ebook called Mortal Thoughts, laying out his version of events. In his telling, Elizabeth comes across as manipulative, sexually mature, and caught in the grip of drugs; he, by contrast, was a young and sober virgin, helpless against her charms. Over the next few years, he wrote dozens of articles and several more books, including volumes on prison reform and Christian meditation, gaining him a handful of supporters, including a Catholic bishop. He slowly expanded what he called his “circle of friends,” finding advocates in the U.S. and in Germany. Some of them were critics of the U.S. penal system; they saw Jens as a model prisoner who had clearly reformed, even if he might be guilty. Others believed his story—that he had provided an alibi for the killer, yes, but that he was no killer himself.His big break came in 2007, when a German journalist, Karin Steinberger, wrote an article for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung called “Forgotten Behind Bars,” portraying Jens as a victim of flawed and brutal American justice, and endorsing his claim that he had confessed only to protect Elizabeth. Jens’s circle of friends began to expand rapidly. Supporters organized a document archive, maintained a website, managed social-media profiles, and sent information to journalists to lay out their case. They noted, for instance, that the presence of type O blood was hardly conclusive, and they pointed to certain mistakes in Jens’s confessions. He’d gotten Nancy Haysom’s outfit wrong, for instance, and incorrectly described the position of the bodies. This could be seen as consistent with his claim that he had not been at the scene himself but was only repeating what Elizabeth had told him afterward.The strongest argument that emerged in Jens’s favor appeared to come from DNA evidence. This was new, and it was ultimately what drew me into his corner. The DNA evidence arrived in two stages. The first came in 2009, when tests were conducted on 42 evidence swabs that had been collected at the crime scene in 1985. After more than two decades, many had degraded so badly that they yielded no information, but a significant number provided usable results. And none of those samples produced DNA that was consistent with Jens’s. That didn’t prove him innocent, but it gave heart to his supporters. In 2010, the outgoing Virginia governor, during his last days in office, agreed to transfer Jens to Germany, but the action was rescinded by his successor.[From the June 2016 issue: The false promise of DNA testing]In 2012, the president of the European Parliament advocated for Jens to be transferred to a prison back home. That was followed by a request for extradition from more than 100 members of the Bundestag. Then, in 2016, came the documentary Killing for Love, the work of the journalist Karin Steinberger and the filmmaker Marcus Vetter. It was nominated for a major documentary prize in Germany and picked up by Sundance. The following year, Christian Wulff, a former president of Germany, petitioned the Virginia parole board to transfer Jens to his native country. Angela Merkel, then the German chancellor, reportedly lobbied President Barack Obama on Jens’s behalf.The Commonwealth of Virginia was unmoved, and Jens was repeatedly denied parole. But in 2016, Jens’s postconviction attorney, Steven Rosenfield, had an insight that pushed the DNA analysis to a second stage. The insight involved looking at the 2009 DNA test and the 1985 serology test side by side. The two blood swabs that had tested as type O in 1985 had both produced male DNA inconsistent with Jens’s. Two other swabs had tested as type AB—and were assumed to have come from Nancy Haysom—but analysis showed the presence of male DNA, and it was also inconsistent with Jens’s. Based on these facts, Rosenfield and two experts—Thomas McClintock, a forensic scientist at Liberty University, in Lynchburg, and Moses Schanfield, a forensic scientist at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.—maintained that Jens could not have been the source of the type O blood (because the DNA from the samples was inconsistent with his) and that Nancy Haysom could not have been the source of the type AB blood (because the DNA from the samples was male). Rosenfield made the logical inference that the attack had been carried out by two unknown male suspects—one with type O blood and one with type AB blood. Presumably, both had suffered some sort of injury in the attack, enough to leave blood residue.It was a compelling theory, and soon a host of other high-profile advocates came to Jens’s defense, including the novelist John Grisham, the actor Martin Sheen, and my friend Jason Flom, a founding board member of the Innocence Project. Even Chuck Reid, the Bedford County detective, expressed doubts about Jens’s conviction. Rosenfield filed a petition for an immediate and absolute pardon. The petition was denied.It was around this time, in early 2019, that I first became aware of Jens Söring. In affiliation with SundanceTV, I had begun to host a podcast called The Truth About True Crime, which I co-produced and co-wrote with my husband, Christopher Robinson. Each season corresponded with a documentary on the Sundance channel, and for Season 3 we were asked to produce a series that tied in with Killing for Love, the German documentary about the Haysom murders. I had told my partners at Sundance that I would host the podcast only if I could form my own opinion about the various cases we covered, even if it contradicted the viewpoint of the associated documentaries. Sundance was fine with that. I went into the Haysom case with no preconceptions.In preparing my podcast, I watched Steinberger and Vetter’s documentary. I also read Jens’s 2017 book, A Far, Far Better Thing. I grew sympathetic toward Jens, but the opinions of McClintock and Schanfield were what solidified my belief in his innocence. Their forensic credentials were solid, and both had written letters in support of Jens. I spoke with McClintock for the podcast. He was convinced that the type O blood couldn’t have come from Jens and that the DNA revealed the presence of two unknown men. Jens, he believed, was likely innocent. At the very least, if the DNA evidence had been available at his original trial, Jens almost certainly would not have been convicted.For the podcast, I went on to speak with Andy Griffiths, a former detective from Sussex, England, and an expert on police interrogations. In a 2016 report written for Jens’s team, Griffiths had pointed out that Jens had been questioned without an attorney present, and that his statements to the police tracked a pattern in false confessions by young suspects: They often take the blame to protect others. While some saw Jens’s detailed knowledge of the crime scene as evidence of his guilt, Griffiths focused on inconsistencies that he believed the detectives should have pursued further. As Griffiths saw it, Jens, in his police interviews, was either looking for clues from the detectives as to what to say “or he has derived his crime-scene information from a third party.” He speculated that the “third party in this case would obviously be Elizabeth.”The police had also dismissed a lead about two local “drifters,” as they were described, named William Shifflett and Robert Albright, who were later arrested for a separate murder that occurred in a neighboring county around the same time as the Haysom killings. Could they be the two unknown males suggested by Rosenfield and his team?In my own mind, some of the most convincing evidence came in the form of Jens himself—that is, from the kind of person he seemed to be. I interviewed him many times in the course of producing the podcast, each tinny phone call limited to 20 minutes until the female voice of the prison phone system (“You have one minute remaining”) signaled the end of our time. Jens jokingly referred to that voice as “my girlfriend,” a rather dark bit of humor, given that the only real girlfriend he’d ever had was Elizabeth. Jens was educated and witty, like a professor you’d meet at a dinner party. He was also desperate, grasping for any hope of escape. I acutely understood how I, with my particular and very public history, offered him hope by way of example.In the end, Chris and I produced an eight-part podcast for Sundance about the case. We even butted heads with the network when we refused to play by the typical rules of the whodunit genre—that is, holding back the reveal—and insisted on framing this story as a wrongful conviction from the very first beat.Freedom finally came for Jens, but not the way he thought it would. In November 2019, I was in the baking aisle of a grocery store when my phone rang and a recorded voice announced a prepaid call from an inmate in the Virginia Department of Corrections. The first words Jens uttered had a muted jubilance I’d never heard from him before. “This is the last time I’ll ever call you from a prison phone,” he said.Jens had not been pardoned. He had been granted parole. Apparently, political pressure had finally worked. Elizabeth had been granted parole too: The authorities could not release a convicted double murderer while refusing to release someone who had pleaded guilty to accessory charges. The board’s official reasoning was based on the youth of the pair at the time of the offense, their “institutional adjustment” while behind bars, and the amount of time served. Both were to be permanently expelled from the country. Elizabeth, then 55, was deported to Canada, where she held citizenship. Jens, then 53, was deported to Germany. In legal terms, he was still a convicted double murderer. But he was free.Chris and I were eager to meet Jens in person. When I first arrived home from Italy, after four years in prison, what I’d needed, more than words or letters or welcome-home gifts, was hugs from my family and friends, who had been flattened into photographs and distant voices. I wanted to give Jens the longest hug. The pandemic, unfortunately, crushed any immediate hope of traveling to Germany.Jens and I spoke often on the phone, and I became something of a mentor. It was a strange mentorship, given that he was so much older than me and had spent many more years in prison. But for the past decade, I’d been struggling to rebuild my life in freedom, and had had to do so under the eye of the media, a path on which Jens was just starting out. I gave him advice on interview requests, on therapy, on public speaking, on dating, on self-care, on taking his time. My own instinct had been to rush back into my life to make up for all the years I’d missed. That led me to trust the wrong people at times, and at other times to avoid seeking help. I didn’t want Jens to make the same mistakes.[Read: Amanda Knox and the 21st-century witch hunt]Jens was particularly concerned about a man named Andrew Hammel, whom he described as a persistent troll. He’s trying to destroy my life, Jens told me. He keeps writing article after article saying I’m guilty. I’d experienced attacks like these. To this day, there is a devoted community of Amanda Knox “guilters” who run websites arguing that I’m a murderer. In the past decade and a half, I’ve been subjected to sensational treatment in the press in all its variety: in the tabloids, in books, in documentaries, in made-for-TV movies. Not long ago, I wrote an article for this magazine, “Who Owns Amanda Knox?,” reflecting on how the film Stillwater—a loose interpretation of my own story, made without my consent—reinforced an image of me as guilty. The stigma of a murder conviction never goes away, even after you’ve been exonerated. I told Jens to ignore Hammel; the people who mattered were those who believed in his innocence. I told him to enjoy his freedom and not be consumed by the battle to prove every last skeptic wrong. I’d had to accept this myself.In November 2021, as the pandemic abated, Chris and I flew to Hamburg with our four-month-old daughter to meet Jens and do a follow-up interview with him for our new podcast, Labyrinths, which told stories of people who’d felt lost or trapped and how they’d found their way again. It was an emotional few days. We strolled together through Hamburg, and Jens showed us his first-ever apartment and the decor he had carefully chosen; after three decades in the ugliness of prison, he’d embraced the chance to make his own space beautiful. He reflected on the years and opportunities he’d lost, and teared up while holding my infant daughter in his arms.While in Germany, I also sat for an interview with Charlotte Theile, a German reporter, to talk about my case. She was familiar with Labyrinths, and through correspondence, I’d grown to trust her acumen and thoroughness. A few months later, she reached out and said that she had listened to the new Labyrinths episode we’d put out, “The Ultimate Putz,” in which Jens reflected on how unwise he had been to try to take the blame for Elizabeth’s actions. Theile had then gone back and listened to the full season about Jens that we’d made for the Truth About True Crime podcast, which she said she’d enjoyed.But, she went on, she had then decided to listen to a new German podcast, Das System Söring (released in English as The Soering System in late 2023). The podcast, produced by Alice Brauner and Johanna Behre, featured interviews with Andrew Hammel, the man Jens had warned me about, and with Terry Wright, the British detective who’d taken Jens’s confessions in London. The “system” of the title referred to the way Jens had cultivated a perception of innocence and a network of supporters. Theile told me that she had approached the podcast with skepticism but ultimately had come away believing that Jens was very likely guilty.She urged me to read the Wright Report, a 454-page document compiled by Wright and officially titled A True Report on the Facts of the Investigation of the Murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom. It had been made available in January 2020, after my original podcast devoted to Jens’s case came out, on the website of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, where it appeared alongside an article by Hammel. This was the first I’d heard about it.“I know that Jens Söring is a friend of yours,” Theile wrote. “But for me it just doesn’t feel right that you linked your case so closely to Jens Söring. He is not a version of you that got to spend more time in prison. His case is completely different from yours. He lived in London as a criminal, wearing fake beards and stealing from banks”—this last being a reference to the check-fraud scheme that had ultimately led to his arrest. “He had lots of criminal energy. And from what I can see, he is still trying to manipulate people.”I did not dig into the Wright Report immediately. I was raising a child and working on other projects. Jens was already paroled and living as a free man in Germany. Looking further into his case would have meant less time advocating for potentially innocent people still in prison. In the meantime, Jens was telling me to avoid Hammel at all costs. Beware, he may try to reach out to you. Don’t respond. Hammel, he said, was an obsessive troll, a crackpot conspiracy theorist. I had grown to trust Jens, so I took his word for it.But eventually, I did confront the Wright Report, prepared to encounter what I was certain would be half-truths and mischaracterizations. That isn’t what I found.When Terry Wright learned, in 2016, that none of Jens’s DNA had been found at the crime scene, and that the DNA that had been recovered seemed to indicate the presence of two unknown males, he was curious about the findings and open to revising his opinion. He began reviewing the 30-year-old case, thinking that if the evidence really did support Jens’s innocence, he would write a letter to the governor of Virginia, urging him to issue a pardon. But what Wright found only further convinced him of Jens’s guilt. His report goes into every element of the case, with a particular focus on Jens’s confessions as well as on the DNA.Wright argued that the DNA results were not exonerating after all. Specifically, they did not indicate the presence of two unknown males, which Jens’s defenders had come to accept as a basic premise. Wright made three fundamental points.First, the evidence samples in the Haysom case were not vials of blood, like you’d find in a hospital lab. They were cotton swabs that had been rubbed on bloodstained surfaces, and the swabs would have picked up other material, such as skin cells, saliva, and sweat. The testing done on these swabs in 2009 could not indicate where the DNA had come from, only the fact of its presence. The DNA from the blood may have been too degraded to capture.Second, although the DNA from the swabs was degraded and partial, the results that were usable appeared to be consistent with one another. Which meant that although the various swabs held different blood types, the DNA on them appeared to come from a single male.Third, the consistent male-DNA profile was highly likely to belong to Derek Haysom. A formal DNA sample had never been collected from Haysom—this was 1985—but that conclusion made sense. The killings had taken place in his house, and his skin cells, saliva, sweat, and other nonblood DNA would have been everywhere, and picked up by the swabs wherever they were rubbed.If Wright’s argument was correct—that the DNA on the swabs hadn’t necessarily come from the blood on the swabs—it meant that the type O blood could still very well have come from Jens. Crucially, it also meant that there was no evidence to support the idea that two unknown males had been present at the crime scene.I was not equipped to assess whether Wright’s theory was plausible, and even if it was, it didn’t prove that Jens was guilty. But the very idea of an alternate interpretation of the DNA shook my confidence.I should have known better than to give the original interpretation such weight, because of the lessons from my own case. Once the prosecution claimed that it had DNA proof of my guilt—my DNA on the handle of a knife, Meredith’s DNA on the blade—every piece of exonerating evidence was cast aside by the jury and the media as irrelevant: DNA doesn’t lie. Well, it did when it came to the accusations against me. Independent experts eventually determined that the supposed DNA evidence was the result of lab contamination. Without it, the evidence in my favor was overwhelming.Yet I had made a similar mistake in Jens’s case, albeit in reverse. Once I’d learned that the DNA excluded Jens as a source of the type O blood—and then, more important, that forensic evidence pointed to a pair of unknown men as the killers—I’d found reasons to discount every piece of evidence pointing to his guilt. I’ve long been aware of how cognitive bias affects one’s thinking. We all bring preconceptions to the information we encounter. That’s why it’s best if a fingerprint analyst isn’t told that a suspect has confessed, and why a medical examiner should not be made aware of witness testimony or DNA evidence. I’ve advocated for practices such as these, but I failed to heed similar precautions. The supposed DNA exoneration of Jens Söring, which had been my starting point, became my sole point of reference. If the DNA evidence proved his innocence, then logic dictated that everything else, no matter how circumstantially damning, had to have some rational explanation. But now, reading the Wright Report—and with DNA findings removed from consideration—I was seeing all of that evidence with fresh eyes.From the very first moment, there were signs pointing to Jens, not Elizabeth, as the actual killer. When the detectives had initially asked Elizabeth and Jens for fingerprints, footprints, and blood samples, Elizabeth had complied. Jens had stalled, offering a rambling excuse about his diplomatic status, and how being involved in a homicide investigation could compromise his scholarship and lead to deportation. Then, a few days later, after wiping all the fingerprints from his car and apartment and emptying his bank account, he’d fled the country.The confessions were particularly troubling. Though it was true that Jens had not had an attorney present—as Andy Griffiths noted—he had repeatedly been given British and American legal warnings, and he’d explicitly waived his right to an attorney both verbally and in written statements. (When Jens claimed on appeal that he’d been denied access to a lawyer, the court determined that there was “clear and convincing evidence” to the contrary.) Jens had confessed to the murders many times and on multiple days, often speaking to the detectives at his own request. He had done so in front of British detectives, American investigators, and a German prosecutor. The story he told was highly specific. He explained how Derek and Nancy had let him into their home and offered him a drink; how he’d confronted them about their disapproval of his relationship with Elizabeth; and how he’d snapped and killed them, even demonstrating how he’d come up behind Derek to slit his throat. He described how he’d fled the scene and hit a dog with the car as he sped away; how he’d thrown away his bloody clothes; how he’d returned to the Washington, D.C., hotel. He even told the detectives that hotel security-camera footage should be able to confirm this last point. (As it happened, the hotel cameras provided only live feeds and did not save a backup record.) Jens knew who had been sitting where at the dinner table, what the Haysoms had been eating and drinking, and how they’d been killed. He even showed the detectives a scar on his hand from a wound he said he’d suffered during the attack.I felt particularly sick recalling that detail. At his trial, prosecutors had produced eyewitness testimony that Jens wore a bandage on one hand at the Haysoms’ funeral, corroborating that bit of his confession. In his defense, Jens had unspooled a counter-narrative—that he’d injured his hand in a car accident. Believing that the DNA findings exonerated Jens, I took this explanation as fact. In other ways, too, I had been predisposed to dismiss potential evidence of Jens’s guilt, especially his confessions. A false confession had helped seal my own guilty verdict, and a part of me had felt vindicated to find further evidence that confessions were not a gold standard. But without the exculpatory DNA, I began to see how many reasons there were to believe that Jens’s confessions were genuine.Jens did not recant his confession immediately, the way I had recanted my false confession hours after I was released from the interrogation room. He kept to his story for four years, until 1990, when his trial was set to begin. Explaining away the confessions had been a huge challenge for his defense. In pretrial hearings, Jens accused Detective Beever, in London, of threatening to harm Elizabeth if he didn’t confess. That story wasn’t supported by evidence, so Jens pivoted, finally landing on the story he has kept to ever since: that he lied to save Elizabeth from the death penalty. In light of all this, the minor errors he’d made—Nancy Haysom’s outfit (he got the right color but the wrong type of garment), the position of the bodies (he got the right rooms and positions but the wrong orientations)—were likely attributable to simple memory lapses in recalling the event more than a year later.The love letters and diary entries highlighted in the Wright Report were also damning. I am by nature wary of such evidence. My own accusers pointed to a short story I’d written in college as proof that I harbored rape fantasies. But the letters and diary entries weren’t creative-writing assignments. In letters written before the murders, Jens had written comments such as “My God, I’ve got the dinner scene planned out.” And this: “I can see myself depriving people of their property quite easily—your dad, for instance. Even more easily can I see myself depriving many souls (if they exist) of their physical bodies (which might not exist, either) in the course of fulfilling my many, many excessively bizarre sexual fantasies.” Jens speculated that he and Elizabeth could use a spate of local burglaries for cover: “That there have been many burglaries in the area opens the possibility for another one with the same general circumstances, only this time the unfortunate owners …”I had not seen these letters and diary entries until reading the Wright Report. Believing that the DNA evidence exonerated Jens, I’d found no reason to dig through circumstantial evidence like this. Now I couldn’t look away.Perhaps most frightening of all was this passage: “I’ve felt this, I’m feeling it now inside me, this need to plant one’s foot in somebody’s face, to always crush … I have not explored the side of me that wishes to crush to any real extent—I have yet to kill, possibly the ultimate act of crushing.”As I read those words, Jens’s face flashed in my mind, his gentle smile, his eyes looking down at my infant daughter in his arms.My inquiries led me next to Jens’s biggest critic, Andrew Hammel. I had at first assumed that Hammel must be part of the niche online movement of “innocence fraud” activists. I had a personal window into this community, a loose cluster of podcasters and YouTubers who seem to believe that Innocence Project lawyers and advocates are working to free killers because they’re hopelessly deluded. “You, of all people, should be distrustful of reporters,” Jens had written in our final email exchange. “And you, of all people, should be distrustful of reports and documents produced by people who are strongly motivated to prove a defendant’s guilt.”But when I actually read Hammel’s writing, including his book Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth, he didn’t come across as the troll I was expecting. He was more of a provocateur. Of course, that didn’t mean his arguments were correct. But he seemed to be a logical thinker and a thorough researcher who engaged with evidence in good faith. I asked if I could interview him for Labyrinths. Jens Söring in Germany after his parole and extradition, 2019 (Daniel Roland / Getty) Hammel, I learned, was a lawyer who had done death-penalty defense work for a decade before turning to academia and journalism. He was intimately aware of the efforts of the Innocence Project. He told me that, in his view, debunking fraudulent innocence claims was essential to the work of exonerating people who really were innocent: It provided a record of hard-edged credibility.Hammel made a compelling case for Jens’s guilt, his arguments mostly tracking those in the Wright Report. He also provided important context for the DNA testing. The analysis done in 2009 had been ordered by Virginia as part of a review of thousands of cases. It had not been requested by Jens or his defense counsel. In fact, Jens had refused to file the petition necessary to do more DNA testing in his case. As Hammel saw it, that is what you would expect from someone who worries that DNA testing would be incriminating rather than exonerating.Hammel also told me about the work of two journalists in Charlottesville, Courteney Stuart and Rachel Ryan. They had made a podcast, released after mine, called Small Town, Big Crime. Through records requests, they had obtained DNA profiles from the supposed alternate suspects in the Haysom murders, Shifflett and Albright. They had then asked Jens’s own expert, Tom McClintock, to compare their DNA to the DNA recovered from the Haysom scene. He did, and found the samples to be inconsistent. That ruled out Shifflett and Albright. “I was bummed out, I’m telling you,” McClintock acknowledged on the Small Town, Big Crime podcast. Those specific findings about Shifflett and Albright lent weight to Terry Wright’s broader evaluation of the DNA evidence—that it failed to substantiate any two-unknown-males theory.Hammel gave me one more lead, and it involved someone Jens had never mentioned: Dan E. Krane, a forensic scientist and biology professor at Wright State University, in Ohio. Krane was a DNA expert who in 2018 had participated in a special segment about Jens’s case on 20/20—a segment that leaned in favor of Jens. He had confirmed on the program that none of Jens’s DNA had been found at the scene, a simple statement of fact. But Krane’s expert views, Hammel told me, aligned with those of Terry Wright on one key point. I decided I needed to speak with Krane.In advance of our conversation, conducted on Zoom, Krane forwarded to me a report he had written in 2017 that began by laying out his credentials. He had published more than 50 scholarly papers on subjects such as the use of DNA typing in forensic science. He had testified in more than 100 criminal proceedings that involved forensic DNA. He was the author of a widely used textbook on bioinformatics.“Saliva is a remarkably good source of DNA,” Krane told me. “A milliliter of saliva will have 10 times as much DNA in it as a milliliter of blood. We’re transferring saliva DNA all over the place all the time. If Derek Haysom had sneezed at some point in the past year, before the crime occurred, I’d frankly be surprised if you didn’t find his DNA.” Krane noted that there is no possible test to determine whether the swabs in the Haysom case had picked up not only blood but other sources of DNA. Odds are, he said, that they would have. He went on: “Just because a sample tested positive for blood and you got DNA from that sample, that doesn’t mean that the DNA came from the blood that was in the sample.” Krane believed, as Wright had surmised, that the DNA recovered from the old crime-scene samples was likely Derek Haysom’s.He gave no credence to the theory advanced by Jens and his experts—linking the DNA to the blood itself and pointing a finger at two unknown male contributors. To begin with, Krane didn’t have confidence in the original serology testing; there were discrepancies in some of the notes. But focus just on the DNA—on the fact that the parts that could be compared from the various recovered samples all matched up. The two-unknown-males theory, Krane said, requires a combination of virtually impossible events: Unknown male No. 1 (the supposed source of the type O blood) would have to have DNA consistent with that of unknown male No. 2 (the supposed source of the type AB blood), and both of their DNA profiles would also have to be consistent with that of Derek Haysom (the source of the type A blood). “That these three people would have the same combination of alleles—that’s just staggeringly unlikely,” Krane told me.Could Elizabeth have committed the murders while Jens waited at the hotel, unawares—the scenario Jens had spun? That raised its own set of questions. If that’s what happened, then where did the type O blood come from? If it was from an accomplice, who was that person? And what possible reason could Elizabeth have to protect that person at her and Jens’s expense all these decades later?Elizabeth. When I first started researching the Haysom case, I had identified with Elizabeth, up to a point. She had been cast by Jens and by the media as a manipulative seductress, as I had been portrayed. I recalled feeling disconcerted when I saw Elizabeth described that way in one of Jens’s books. She and Jens have not been in communication and have not seen each other since she testified at Jens’s trial—naming Jens as her parents’ killer and confessing that she had put him up to it. From prison, Elizabeth wrote a column for a local paper called “Glimpses From the Inside”—reflective, diary-like accounts about her own incarceration and life in general. I wanted to speak with Elizabeth, so I wrote her a letter in 2019. She responded from prison and seemed open to talking, but once I told her that I was also talking with Jens, she broke off communication. She has apparently been living in Canada since her release, and she appears to have changed her name. I have been unable to make contact. I wish I could speak with her now.I had given Jens a large platform, and in advocating for his innocence, I had also advocated for Elizabeth’s guilt as the person who had wielded the knife. I had contributed to her vilification as a liar and as the actual killer. It was Elizabeth, after all, who pleaded guilty as an accessory to capital murder. She had begged forgiveness and expressed deep remorse. Her paternal half-siblings have forgiven her, according to a 2023 Netflix documentary about the case, Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs. Haysom. Reflecting on all of this, I realized that I owed Elizabeth an apology, and that I owed the families of Derek and Nancy Haysom, and my own audience, more transparency about how my thinking had evolved. In an episode of Labyrinths I released with Andrew Hammel in September 2023, I retracted my claims about Jens’s innocence and said frankly what I now believe: We may never know definitively whether Jens killed Derek and Nancy Haysom, but the evidence incriminating him is hard to rebut—his repeated official confessions; his own words, in letters and diaries; his bandaged hand at the funeral; Elizabeth’s testimony. Meanwhile, the exonerating evidence has evaporated.Unsurprisingly, the release of my interview with Hammel caused strife among advocates who still support Jens. Some of them are unwilling to reexamine their beliefs about what the DNA evidence actually shows in this case. Some worry that I have damaged the innocence movement by giving critics a platform. And after 33 years in prison, hasn’t Jens been through enough? I do agree that paroling Jens and Elizabeth, now both close to 60, was the right decision: More than three decades in prison is serious punishment for a serious crime. But even if my friends in the innocence community never come around to my view of Jens and the Haysom murders, I hope that they will understand why I felt compelled to explain my position—and why innocence advocates need to be forthright when they believe that claims of innocence do not hold up. My friendships with the wrongly convicted have been as important to me as my relationships with my own family. With Jens, my yearning for a connection had influenced my judgment. I am left with a disturbing question: Had Jens created a character he knew I couldn’t help but embrace? I fear I know the answer, but even now, I don’t want it to be true.​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In 1939, Ernest Hemingway left a large collection of his belongings—the manuscript of his earliest short story, childhood trinkets, memorabilia from his time at war, intimate letters, books, and more—in a storeroom behind Sloppy Joe’s, a bar he frequented in Key West that was owned by some friends of his. When Penn State University’s Toby and Betty Bruce Collection of Ernest Hemingway acquired the items in 2021, it represented the most significant trove of Hemingway memorabilia discovered in generations. But not everything went to Penn State. Some materials found at Sloppy Joe’s instead entered the rare-book marketplace, including 40 books from Hemingway’s personal collection. I know this because I have them.As modernist rare-book collectors, my father and I decided to add these works to our collection when we came across the listing. They include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, inscribed to Hemingway by his “loving mother” (with whom he had a contentious relationship, according to his letters, and whom he blamed for his father’s suicide); his high-school debate textbook, ornamented with doodles of a tree and a snake; and a war novel holding a pencil-written note to himself—a reminder to compose a story about the “death of Lieut. Taylor with flu in Milan.” These books stretch from Hemingway’s youngest years to 1939, when he turned 40; they not only illuminate Hemingway’s reading habits, but they also date particular books he owned to certain periods of his life.As I fell down a rabbit hole investigating whether Hemingway ultimately wrote a story about a Lieut. Taylor (a mystery I’m still trying to solve), I wondered about which other literary pearls are housed in private collections.Just because a book is a first edition does not always mean it is “rare”—the same goes for the old book on your shelf that was published back in 1857. A book’s demand, condition, publishing history, whether it is signed or inscribed, and even the timing of when a book enters the market are all factors that affect its value. A dust jacket–less first edition of The Great Gatsby is not as rare as a copy wearing the famous dust jacket. The former commands, on average, $4,500 to $8,000 (mostly depending on its condition), while a copy with an unrestored dust jacket is likely to command at least $100,000. Even rarer is an inscribed copy—the most recent of which sold in September for £226,800 at Christie’s, or about $283,000. (This same copy had sold at Bonhams for $191,000 in 2015, demonstrating how its value skyrocketed in less than a decade.) I turn to The Great Gatsby not only because it’s arguably the most famous rare book in terms of 20th-century first editions, but also to illustrate that its value has the capacity to vary, and that a truly one-of-a-kind book involves more than merely being a first edition with a dust jacket. The copy that sold at Christie’s belonged to Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer, whose fame potentially played into the book’s value. But that value comes primarily from the quality and nature of Fitzgerald’s inscription, which was presented to a friend, Harold Goldman, whom Fitzgerald refers to as “the original ‘Gatsby’” in his note. The cover of a debate book on which Hemingway drew a tree and a snake (Courtesy of the author) [Read: A new way to read Gatsby]In addition to being a collector and an obsessive reader, I’m also an academic—meaning I understand acutely how crucial it is for people to be able to explore literary history through primary documents, and how even the smallest marginalia may carry immense meaning. Does the copy of The Great Gatsby signed to Goldman belong in an institution, such as the New York Public Library or a university’s special collections, where the public can see and access it, whether it be for the pleasure of viewership or for scholarship? (Conversations on the ethics of private ownership permeate the fine-art world too, wherein wealthy individuals—such as Madonna and Jay-Z—own Basquiats, Warhols, and Picassos.) Rare-book dealers will tell you that private collections involve less red tape than institutions—bureaucratic hurdles to access that aren’t in the public interest. For example, in libraries, uncataloged books can lie untouched for months, or even longer, because of a librarian’s other responsibilities or a lack of resources and time. For these reasons, donations or newly purchased books may not be as readily available as one may think. At the same time, Rebecca Romney, a co-founder of the rare-book firm Type Punch Matrix and the rare-books consultant for the TV show Pawn Stars, told me that “it’s not uncommon for collectors to have open invitations for scholars to come to their collection. It’s more the rule than the exception. This is the whole point”—collectors want to share their collections.The dilemma regarding the ethical placement of a rare book isn’t convoluted for Tom Lecky, who was the head of the rare-books and manuscripts department at the auction firm Christie’s for 17 years and now runs Riverrun Books & Manuscripts. When I mentioned the Hemingway manuscript of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” that sold for $248,000 at Christie’s back in 2000, he pointed out that institutions had had “every bit the opportunity to buy it as a private individual.” Other singular works that have been up for auction are James Joyce’s “Circe” manuscript, Sylvia Plath’s personally annotated Bible, a serial printing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era newspaper, and the proofs of that first Great Gatsby dust jacket. In each case, I was captivated by their fate. The National Library of Ireland bought Joyce’s manuscript for $1.5 million and digitized it; Plath’s Bible went to an undisclosed buyer for about $11,000; so did the newspapers, for $126,000. Nobody placed a winning bid for the Gatsby cover art.For Lecky, the ethical question we should be asking isn’t whether institutions should acquire rare books instead of collectors, but what happens when “a private owner owns something that no one knows that they have.” Lecky, like many others in the trade, works to dispel myths about how private collections work. Private collections tend to be temporary and books often jump between hands, but for the time that a collector owns a book, in my view, they should make efforts to share it. “Most collectors don’t think of it as possession but caretaking,” Lecky said. “They’re a piece of the chain in the provenance, not the end of it.”Historically, private collectors have formed the foundations of institutions. “There are entire libraries and museums that were created by collectors,” Barbara Heritage, the director of collections, exhibitions, and scholarly initiatives at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, told me—the Morgan Library & Museum; the Getty Research Institute; the Folger Shakespeare Library; and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, to name a few.Many rare books, manuscripts, and items in the collections at these institutions are donated by or purchased from private collectors. In other cases, a donor supplies the funds for an institution to make general or specific acquisitions. If you’ve visited the permanent “Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library’s Treasures,” you might have seen one-of-a-kind items on rotation, such as an early manuscript draft of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, and a page from the manuscript of an unpublished chapter of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. These pieces were “acquired through the generosity of” a donor or were donated by a collector.Collectors tend to donate or sell their collections to institutions if they don’t put them back into the marketplace via auction houses or rare-book sellers. “Collecting isn’t mere shopping,” Heritage said. “The best collecting requires vision, passion, knowledge, and creativity—and, above all, persistence.” Collecting, for Heritage, has the capacity to be a form of advocacy through the creation of knowledge and the ability to tie together strands of knowledge that otherwise couldn’t be done unless one has a lifelong devotion to a particular subject. Some collectors have honed niche collections that have since been deposited in libraries (either wholly or partially). Walter O. Evans collected Black artwork and literature that now constitute mainstay collections—such as the Walter O. Evans Collection of Frederick Douglass and Douglass Family Papers and the Walter O. Evans collection of James Baldwin—at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The Douglass papers in Evans’s collection have been digitized so that scholars, students, and the public can access them.[Read: The way we write history has changed]Or consider the archives created from the collections of Lisa Unger Baskin, who sold her trove of women-related ephemera—including thousands of books dating from 1240 to the late 20th century—to Duke University. Unger Baskin’s political activism is reflected in her collection of materials created by women. She told me how, for example, she priced herself out of the market because she participated in the creation of a market that values women’s work. With a sharp eye, she bought many materials that others didn’t pay attention to, such as Charlotte Brontë’s needlework, which she scooped up in London for £60. Before selling to Duke, Unger Baskin considered four other universities. Their financial offers were obviously salient, but she liked that Duke promised to make her assemblage a teaching collection, so she accepted its proposal and sold everything to the school, including a desk that was designed and used by Virginia Woolf. Because Unger Baskin continues to collect, she has a contract with Duke stipulating that the rest of her collection will also go there.Sammy Jay, a senior literature specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books, told me that collectors are “scholars in a hybrid sense.” For Stuart A. Rose—the namesake of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University—amassing materials is synonymous with sharing them with the public. He chose to donate much of his collection to his alma mater rather than put it back into the marketplace. (Like Unger Baskin, he’s still collecting. Unlike her, he has yet to make up his mind about what he’ll do with the materials he continues to acquire.) Today, he opens his home to classes at Ohio State University and says he has never turned down a scholar who wants to reference a book in his collection, which includes a copy of The Great Gatsby inscribed by Fitzgerald, one of the first 100 copies of Ulysses signed by Joyce, and what he claims is the most extensive private collection of Jane Austen’s corpus.Though all private collections are at risk of theft, flooding, and fire, collectors argue that these threats are no different from those that institutions face. Private collections tend to have less traffic and less handling, and this limited exposure can help with preservation. Yet preservation may be vulnerable when selling publicly. As Lecky pointed out, “A collection can be formed over 50 years and then suddenly it goes to auction and there are five days of auction exhibit, and in those five days, those books are handled more than they’ve been in the last 50 years.” When rare books are in institutions, Rose believes they should be on view, so that the public can see “what makes a book great.”Rose’s exhibition will be the first on view at one of the two new exhibition halls at the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C., set to be unveiled in June. Other private collectors have taken a less traditional approach to presenting their collections. The artistic director Kim Jones made Woolf’s Orlando a central theme in Fendi’s spring/summer women’s collection in 2021, and used Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as the basis for Dior’s men’s fall 2022 fashion show. Both fashion shows were complemented by exhibits featuring the books that were cornerstones of the collections.If one believes that literary relics should be held only in public environments, then trying to define the ideal private collector is a contradiction in terms. But in practice, access can be complicated. Consider again the inscribed copy of The Great Gatsby, signed by Fitzgerald to his “original Gatsby.” As part of the auction, Christie’s included pictures of the book and its inscription in the listing, along with a detailed description. Though private collecting may rob someone of an unmediated experience with that book, the sale leaves a trail of photos, making it arguably more accessible than it would be in either a private or public collection. Perhaps book enthusiasts should focus less on ownership and more on establishing a broad cultural responsibility to share unique books and manuscripts, be it in the form of a public exhibition, digitization, or appointment-only home visits.At the same time, the rare-books market is evolving as the medium itself changes, which is seen in the popularity of audiobooks and ebooks. Have we, or are we about to, hit a civilizational point in which all writers from today onward will not compose handwritten manuscripts and letters? Will the only manuscripts and letters that circulate the marketplace be pre-2020? Are visible drafts—which allow us to trace an author’s structuring and even restructuring of a novel—a thing of the past, as the errors in our online documents are constantly replaced by spell-check and are saved over and over again, erasing the history of a truly original document? One can project that the marketplace will begin to include technological objects, which will come at exorbitant costs. If bundles of Joan Didion’s empty notebooks sold for $11,000 apiece and her Celine faux-tortoiseshell sunglasses were purchased for $27,000 in 2022, what price tag will be put on an author’s cellphone or laptop, if they choose to sell them? Salman Rushdie, for example, sold his personal archive to Emory, including a Mac desktop, three Mac laptops, and an external hard drive.The ceaseless evolution of technology, the proliferation of cheaply produced paperbacks, and a change in what we consider to be literary objects will undoubtedly affect the future of the trade and the contents of our archives. Will time reveal a pushback in adopting technology in the writing process, or will note-taking software, email, and SMS expand our understanding and the breadth of a personal archive? Lately I have been thinking about how and when I will have to rehome my own collection of rare books and how I see my career unfolding in the rare-book world. As I contemplate these questions, I know that my guiding principle will be accessibility. And in the meantime, I plan to accept an invitation to bring my Hemingways to Penn State University to be digitized.

Anne Hathaway as Solène and Nicholas Galitzine as Hayes in The Idea of You. | Courtesy of Prime From The Idea of You to viral essays, the discourse is rarely about the people inside the relationships. There’s something about age gaps right now. They’re all over the place. The Idea of You, out on Amazon Prime this week, features Anne Hathaway as a 39-year-old mom falling in love with a 24-year-old boy band star, only to be haunted by tabloid covers calling her a cougar. It’s based on a novel of the same title by Robinne Lee, dubbed by Vogue “the sleeper hit of the pandemic.” Meanwhile, over the past few months, the Cut has twice gone viral with articles about age gaps. In December, it published a reported article by Lila Shapiro interviewing multiple couples with significant age gaps. In March came a personal essay by Grazie Sophia Christie about her relationship with her husband, who’s 10 years older. On social media, Shapiro’s report was largely met with fascination and Christie’s with recriminations; both were widely distributed and discussed. In her new memoir Consent, writer Jill Ciment revisits her celebrated memoir of 20 years ago, Half a Life, about her marriage to the man she met when she was 17 and he was her 47-year-old art professor. “Should I refer to him in the language of today — sexual offender, transgressor, abuser of power?” Ciment asks, referring to her late husband, as she describes their first kiss. “Or do I refer to him in the language of 1970, at the apex of the sexual revolution, when the kiss took place — Casanova, silver fox?” The ways we talk about age-gap relationships have changed so completely so fast. They’ve come to be a stand-in for the way the Me Too movement changed our whole erotic vocabulary: Before, titillating; after, abusive. When Taylor Swift first releases “All Too Well” in 2012, it’s received as a tragic breakup song about Swift’s relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal, who she dated when she was 20 and he was 29. When she rereleases it in 2021, it’s received as an account of predatory behavior. Age-gap relationships in the abstract have become a place of talking through our newly heightened societal awareness of power dynamics and the potential therein for abuse — especially when the standard gender roles flip. Frequently, the discourse has almost nothing to do with the people actually in the relationships in question. Historically, men were expected to be older than their wives. The reasons why are as gross as you think. “Haven’t you ever heard that the girl is supposed to be half the man’s age, plus seven?” asks Patty O’Neill in the 1951 play turned 1953 film The Moon Is Blue. Patty, 22, is wooing a 30-year-old man at the time, and she is delighted to find that the math “just works out.” Today, the rule “half your age plus seven years” is popularly held to tell you the youngest possible person you can date without being creepy. A 30-year-old, the idea is, can just about get away with dating a 22-year-old of any gender, but get down to 21 and things start to feel weird. Historically, however, the equation was supposed to dictate the ideal age gap between a man and a woman. It seems to have been fairly common around the midcentury. In 2014, the New Republic found the idea turning up in sources as disparate as The Moon Is Blue (1951) and quotes from Elijah Muhammad in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). American newspapers of the 1930s ascribed the rule to Maurice Chevalier, or, more vaguely, to the French. The ideology that considers this age-gap ideal is profoundly misogynistic. Part of the reason the husband is supposed to be the older figure (twice his wife’s age minus seven years) is to increase his status. Wiser than his wife, the husband could have his own established source of income and his own established adult life before he entered into marriage. The wife would rely on her husband for all of the above. In exchange, the wife would grant her husband her youthful beauty, and the common wisdom held that this exchange was equal. The tricky thing, though, was that the wife’s youth is by its nature fleeting, while the husband’s wealth would with any luck only increase with time. The wife had a ticking clock placed on her social value, and it was up to her to make a good marriage before the clock struck midnight and her social value disappeared. This is a worldview in which a woman’s access to adulthood depends upon her erotic value. Her beauty is all she has to trade to the world in order to be granted the status of full personhood — and even that personhood is contingent, because the wife can only ever access it through her husband. In Christie’s Cut essay, she positions her own marriage as being part of this very legacy. Christie consciously set out to choose an older husband, she writes, because she wanted to benefit from the financial security of an older and wealthier partner, and she thought her best bet was to use the currency of her youth and beauty before they became devalued by age. “I had, like all women, a calculator in my head,” she writes. “I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we [Christie and her fellow female classmates at Harvard] really ought to have been preparing.” The asymmetry in power between Christie and her husband, she writes, benefits her so much that she feels no real need to right it. “Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself?” she asks rhetorically. “I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.” It’s only fair to take Christie at her word that she’s happy in her marriage. Yet the exchange she describes sits oddly in the modern era, particularly in the post-Me Too era’s heightened awareness of sexual power dynamics. You run across the same dilemma in all the age-gap think pieces. “It’s perfectly possible for two consenting adults to have a healthy and equitable relationship despite a significant age gap,” mused a Guardian article from 2020 on Leonardo DiCaprio’s habit of dating only 25-year-olds. However, the article continued, “​It feels like a major flag if a man consistently dates women half his age. One suspects that person isn’t actually looking for a partner, but an admirer.” In her Cut article, Shapiro outlines the basic problem. The anti-age-gap discourse, she writes, emerged from the Me Too movement’s “concern with power differentials and with coercion and consent.” On the other hand: “It also sits at odds with Me Too’s core ethos — ‘Believe women’ — by raising an outcry on behalf of women who, by all available public accounts, have no complaints about their relationships. Even if they say they are happy, the age-gap critics don’t believe them.” In the wake of the new discourse, even the people involved in the relationships can’t always believe themselves or the things they say. Much of the tension of Consent comes from Ciment’s anguished and untrusting analysis of her old memoir, the one where she told the story of her marriage as a straight love story. In her first memoir, 1996’s Half a Life, Ciment consistently describes herself as the sexual aggressor in her early encounters with her future husband, Arnold. Yet looking back over the manuscript 25 years later in Consent, she feels her old account cannot be trusted. “Am I as delusional as Humbert Humbert when he narrates (Lolita is twelve at the time), ‘It was she who seduced me’?” Ciment writes. “When I wrote this, was I protecting Arnold? The statute of limitations had long ago passed. Was I protecting my marriage? We had just celebrated our twenty-seventh anniversary.” Ciment and Arnold were married until Arnold’s death in 2016, and according to Ciment, their marriage was a happy one. Still, she keeps interrogating herself. “Had Arnold experienced the sea change of the MeToo era, would he have come to believe that he crossed a line when he first kissed me?” she writes. “Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning? … Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?” Things get even more complicated when we reverse the gender roles. Is there a gender swap exception? Discussions about age-gap relationships in which the woman is older than the man tend, on average, to be less about whether or not the woman is a predator and more about whether or not she should be humiliated for dating a younger man. Her detractors might dismiss her as a desperate cougar; her supporters might frame her dating decisions as a feminist triumph. That’s the tension at the heart of The Idea of You, both the Hathaway film and the novel it’s based on by Robinne Lee. The story centers around Solène, a 39-year-old whose ex-husband is dating a younger woman. Solène grits her teeth at his choices, but she’s not surprised by them: “Because that’s what divorced men in their forties did,” she narrates. “His stock was still rising. His power still intact. Daniel had become more desirable, and I somehow less so. As if time were paced differently for each of us.” Shortly thereafter, Solène finds herself entangled in a love affair with the much younger Hayes Campbell, lead singer of her daughter’s favorite boy band. In the book, Hayes is 20. In the movie, he’s 24. Either way, he’s a lot younger than Solène. When she suggests that the age gap might become a problem, however, Hayes scoffs. “If our ages were reversed, no one would bat an eyelash. Am I right?” says Hayes in Lee’s novel. “So now it’s just some sexist, patriarchal crap, and you don’t strike me as the kind of woman who’s going to let that dictate her happiness. All right? Next issue.” Part of the fantasy of The Idea of You is the idea of a woman whose social currency increases as she ages in the same way that her husband’s does. Solène’s beauty and sophistication are so potent that she does not need to be young to be a catch. Her social value is confirmed by her attractiveness to a man who is not only youthful and beautiful himself but also bears the traditional markers of male power: Young Hayes is richer than Solène’s middle-aged ex-husband will ever be, so that he can fulfill both sides of the old age-gap bargain at once. The fantasy here is not a world in which women’s social power doesn’t depend on their sexual currency. The fantasy here is that a woman’s sexual currency might not depreciate over the course of her 30s — particularly if the woman in question is played by Anne Hathaway, long celebrated for her eternal youthfulness. The result is a sort of mirrorverse version of Christie’s worldview: These are the rules, so let’s maximize our power within them. For some readers, this fantasy is intensely potent and affirming. “It teaches that women remain desirable, strong, and sexually viable as they age: there is no end date,” wrote one reader on Goodreads. “It calls out gender-based double standards. It empowers women to block out all the patriarchal noise and build the life they want. When we change our thoughts, we change our world. This. This is what I needed.” For other readers, the fact of Solène’s gender doesn’t change what they see as the fundamental problem with an age-gap romance: the age part. “idk who lied to this woman,” wrote another Goodreads reviewer, “but f*cking some kid 20 years younger than you is not the feminist slay you think it is.” What happens in the end? There is a question neither The Idea of You nor Christie engages with, which is: What happens as time and age come for all of us? The problem of aging rarely appears in the stories about age-gap relationships, but it is central to the people living in those relationships. “It’s only when the two people actually love each other and want to build a life together that the age gap, as an age gap, not as a gap that stands in for various inequities, actually matters,” says the writer B.D. McClay in an essay on Substack responding to Shapiro’s Cut piece. “If you want to get married and have kids, then you have to deal with what I think of as the sad math: how long the older partner is likely to see your mutual children get to become. Any parent can die, but what makes this different is that the absolute best case scenario might involve, for some, not seeing your kids ever graduate from college.” The problem of aging fills the final pages of Consent, which sees Ciment caring for Arnold toward the end of his life. These scenes are not, she feels, literary. “Who would believe a scene in which Lolita takes Humbert Humbert for cataract surgery?” she writes. “Or worries about his prostate? How would I compose the scene where Lolita arranges hospice care for the man who supposedly stole her childhood? Wouldn’t I have to include the day Lolita is at Humbert Humbert’s bedside when he dies? Isn’t that what happily ever after means? A love that lasts long enough that one lover is there to close the other lover’s eyelids?” Ciment is able to come to a resolution of sorts on her questions in her description of the day of Arnold’s death. She sees him lying in their bed, in “the same position he was in when I went to seduce him forty-five years before,” she writes. As she goes to kiss him, she knows that for all her fretful wondering about their first kiss and what it signifies, “there could be none about our last.” Their final kiss is for the pair of them alone, as individuals and as a couple, and what it signifies is them and their long marriage. It is separate from the asymmetry of power from which they began. The fantasy of The Idea of You, however, cannot quite stand up to such realism. It cringes away from the idea of a Solène who might be past middle age and into old age, who might require caregiving or who might even look significantly older than her boyfriend when they’re lounging by a European poolside together. In Lee’s novel, Hayes and Solène split up at the end of the book and don’t reunite, with Solène explaining that the public scrutiny of their relationship is too difficult for her 12-year-old daughter. The film mostly preserves this ending while tacking on a brief epilogue that suggests Hayes and Solène might reunite after her daughter is off at college. In either case, the relationship presented to the audience is preserved in amber, crystallized at the moment in which the age gap is sexy and not potentially tragic. That age-gap fiction and discourse tends to avoid those tragedies is one of the tells that that age-gap discourse is never about individual people, or even individual couples. It is about the whole history of misogynistic ideology from which our age-gap expectations emerge, and how drastically the way we think about sex and power changed in the space of a few years. The age-gap discourse is a metaphor for the way Me Too changed the world — even if the people in age-gap relationships would rather that it weren’t.

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Nick Wilson, a sophomore at Cornell University, came to Ithaca, New York, to refine his skills as an activist. Attracted by both Cornell’s labor-relations school and the university’s history of campus radicalism, he wrote his application essay about his involvement with a Democratic Socialists of America campaign to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. When he arrived on campus, he witnessed any number of signs that Cornell shared his commitment to not just activism but also militant protest, taking note of a plaque commemorating the armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall in 1969.Cornell positively romanticizes that event: The university library has published a “Willard Straight Hall Occupation Study Guide,” and the office of the dean of students once co-sponsored a panel on the protest. The school has repeatedly screened a documentary about the occupation, Agents of Change. The school’s official newspaper, published by the university media-relations office, ran a series of articles honoring the 40th anniversary, in 2009, and in 2019, Cornell held a yearlong celebration for the 50th, complete with a commemorative walk, a dedication ceremony, and a public conversation with some of the occupiers. “Occupation Anniversary Inspires Continued Progress,” the Cornell Chronicle headline read.As Wilson has discovered firsthand, however, the school’s hagiographical odes to prior protests has not prevented it from cracking down on pro-Palestine protests in the present. Now that he has been suspended for the very thing he told Cornell he came there to learn how to do—radical political organizing—he is left reflecting on the school’s hypocrisies. That the theme of this school year at Cornell is “Freedom of Expression” adds a layer of grim humor to the affair.[Evan Mandery: University of hypocrisy]University leaders are in a bind. “These protests are really dynamic situations that can change from minute to minute,” Stephen Solomon, who teaches First Amendment law and is the director of NYU’s First Amendment Watch—an organization devoted to free speech—told me. “But the obligation of universities is to make the distinction between speech protected by the First Amendment and speech that is not.” Some of the speech and tactics protesters are employing may not be protected under the First Amendment, while much of it plainly is. The challenge universities are confronting is not just the law but also their own rhetoric. Many universities at the center of the ongoing police crackdowns have long sought to portray themselves as bastions of activism and free thought. Cornell is one of many universities that champion their legacy of student activism when convenient, only to bring the hammer down on present-day activists when it’s not. The same colleges that appeal to students such as Wilson by promoting opportunities for engagement and activism are now suspending them. And they’re calling the cops.The police activity we are seeing universities level against their own students does not just scuff the carefully cultivated progressive reputations of elite private universities such as Columbia, Emory University, and NYU, or the equally manicured free-speech bona fides of red-state public schools such as Indiana University and the University of Texas at Austin. It also exposes what these universities have become in the 21st century. Administrators have spent much of the recent past recruiting social-justice-minded students and faculty to their campuses under the implicit, and often explicit, promise that activism is not just welcome but encouraged. Now the leaders of those universities are shocked to find that their charges and employees believed them. And rather than try to understand their role in cultivating this morass, the Ivory Tower’s bigwigs have decided to apply their boot heels to the throats of those under their care.I spoke with 30 students, professors, and administrators from eight schools—a mix of public and private institutions across the United States—to get a sense of the disconnect between these institutions’ marketing of activism and their treatment of protesters. A number of people asked to remain anonymous. Some were untenured faculty or administrators concerned about repercussions from, or for, their institutions. Others were directly involved in organizing protests and were wary of being harassed. Several incoming students I spoke with were worried about being punished by their school before they even arrived. Despite a variety of ideological commitments and often conflicting views on the protests, many of those I interviewed were “shocked but not surprised”—a phrase that came up time and again—by the hypocrisy exhibited by the universities with which they were affiliated. (I reached out to Columbia, NYU, Cornell, and Emory for comment on the disconnect between their championing of past protests and their crackdowns on the current protesters. Representatives from Columbia, Cornell, and Emory pointed me to previous public statements. NYU did not respond.)The sense that Columbia trades on the legacy of the Vietnam protests that rocked campus in 1968 was widespread among the students I spoke with. Indeed, the university honors its activist past both directly and indirectly, through library archives, an online exhibit, an official “Columbia 1968” X account, no shortage of anniversary articles in Columbia Magazine, and a current course titled simply “Columbia 1968.” The university is sometimes referred to by alumni and aspirants as the “Protest Ivy.” One incoming student told me that he applied to the school in part because of an admissions page that prominently listed community organizers and activists among its “distinguished alumni.”Joseph Slaughter, an English professor and the executive director of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, talked with his class about the 1968 protests after the recent arrests at the school. He said his students felt that the university had actively marketed its history to them. “Many, many, many of them said they were sold the story of 1968 as part of coming to Columbia,” he told me. “They talked about it as what the university presents to them as the long history and tradition of student activism. They described it as part of the brand.”This message reaches students before they take their first college class. As pro-Palestine demonstrations began to raise tensions on campus last month, administrators were keen to cast these protests as part of Columbia’s proud culture of student activism. The aforementioned high-school senior who had been impressed by Columbia’s activist alumni attended the university’s admitted-students weekend just days before the April 18 NYPD roundup. During the event, the student said, an admissions official warned attendees that they may experience “disruptions” during their visit, but boasted that these were simply part of the school’s “long and robust history of student protest.”Remarkably, after more than 100 students were arrested on the order of Columbia President Minouche Shafik—in which she overruled a unanimous vote by the university senate’s executive committee not to bring the NYPD to campus—university administrators were still pushing this message to new students and parents. An email sent on April 19 informed incoming students that “demonstration, political activism, and deep respect for freedom of expression have long been part of the fabric of our campus.” Another email sent on April 20 again promoted Columbia’s tradition of activism, protest, and support of free speech. “This can sometimes create moments of tension,” the email read, “but the rich dialogue and debate that accompany this tradition is central to our educational experience.”[Evelyn Douek and Genevieve Lakier: The hypocrisy underlying the campus-speech controversy]Another student who attended a different event for admitted students, this one on April 21, said that every administrator she heard speak paid lip service to the school’s long history of protest. Her own feelings about the pro-Palestine protests were mixed—she said she believes that a genocide is happening in Gaza and also that some elements of the protest are plainly anti-Semitic—but her feelings about Columbia’s decision to involve the police were unambiguous. “It’s reprehensible but exactly what an Ivy League institution would do in this situation. I don’t know why everyone is shocked,” she said, adding: “It makes me terrified to go there.”Beth Massey, a veteran activist who participated in the 1968 protests, told me with a laugh, “They might want to tell us they’re progressive, but they’re doing the business of the ruling class.” She was not surprised by the harsh response to the current student encampment or by the fact that it lit the fuse on a nationwide protest movement. Massey had been drawn to the radical reputation of Columbia’s sister school, Barnard College, as an open-minded teenager from the segregated South: “I actually wanted to go to Barnard because they had a history of progressive struggle that had happened going all the way back into the ’40s.” And the barn-burning history that appealed to Massey in the late 1960s has continued to attract contemporary students, albeit with one key difference: Today, that radical history has become part of the way that Barnard and Columbia sell their $60,000-plus annual tuition.Of course, Columbia is not alone. The same trends have also prevailed at NYU, which likes to crow about its own radical history and promises contemporary students “a world of activism opportunities.” An article published on the university’s website in March—titled “Make a Difference Through Activism at NYU”—promises students “myriad chances to put your activism into action.” The article points to campus institutions that “provide students with resources and opportunities to spark activism and change both on campus and beyond.” The six years I spent as a graduate student at NYU gave me plenty of reasons to be cynical about the university and taught me to view all of this empty activism prattle as white noise. But even I was astounded to see a video of students and faculty set upon by the NYPD, arrested at the behest of President Linda Mills.“Across the board, there is a heightened awareness of hypocrisy,” Mohamad Bazzi, a journalism professor at NYU, told me, noting that faculty were acutely conscious of the gap between the institution’s intensive commitment to DEI and the police crackdown. The university has recently made several “cluster hires”—centered on activism-oriented themes such as anti-racism, social justice, and indigeneity—that helped diversify the faculty. Some of those recent hires were among the people who spent a night zip-tied in a jail cell, arrested for the exact kind of activism that had made them attractive to NYU in the first place. And it wasn’t just faculty. The law students I spoke with were especially acerbic. After honing her activism skills at her undergraduate institution—another university that recently saw a violent police response to pro-Palestine protests—one law student said she came to NYU because she was drawn to its progressive reputation and its high percentage of prison-abolitionist faculty. This irony was not lost on her as the police descended on the encampment.After Columbia students were arrested on April 18, students at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study decided to cancel a planned art festival and instead use the time to make sandwiches as jail support for their detained uptown peers. The school took photos of the students layering cold cuts on bread and posted it to Gallatin’s official Instagram. These posts not only failed to mention that the students were working in support of the pro-Palestine protesters; the caption—“making sandwiches for those in need”—implied that the undergrads might be preparing meals for, say, the homeless.The contradictions on display at Cornell, Columbia, and NYU are not limited to the state of New York. The police response at Emory, another university that brags about its tradition of student protest, was among the most disturbing I have seen. Faculty members I spoke with at the Atlanta school, including two who had been arrested—the philosophy professor Noëlle McAfee and the English and Indigenous-studies professor Emil’ Keme—recounted harrowing scenes: a student being knocked down, an elderly woman struggling to breathe after tear-gas exposure, a colleague with welts from rubber bullets. These images sharply contrast with the university’s progressive mythmaking, a process that was in place even before 2020’s “summer of racial reckoning” sent universities scrambling to shore up their activist credentials.In 2018, Emory’s Campus Life office partnered with students and a design studio to begin work on an exhibit celebrating the university’s history of identity-based activism. Then, not long after George Floyd’s murder, the university’s library released a series of blog posts focusing on topics including “Black Student Activism at Emory,” “Protests and Movements,” “Voting Rights and Public Policy,” and “Authors and Artists as Activists.” That same year, the university announced its new Arts and Social Justice Fellows initiative, a program that “brings Atlanta artists into Emory classrooms to help students translate their learning into creative activism in the name of social justice.” In 2021, the university put on an exhibit celebrating its 1969 protests, in which “Black students marched, demonstrated, picketed, and ‘rapped’ on those institutions affecting the lives of workers and students at Emory.” Like Cornell’s and Columbia’s, Emory’s protests seem to age like fine wine: It takes half a century before the institution begins enjoying them.Nearly every person I talked with believed that their universities’ responses were driven by donors, alumni, politicians, or some combination thereof. They did not believe that they were grounded in serious or reasonable concerns about the physical safety of students; in fact, most felt strongly that introducing police into the equation had made things far more dangerous for both pro-Palestine protesters and pro-Israel counterprotesters. Jeremi Suri, a historian at UT Austin—who told me he is not politically aligned with the protesters—recalls pleading with both the dean of students and the mounted state troopers to call off the charge. “It was like the Russian army had come onto campus,” Suri mused. “I was out there for 45 minutes to an hour. I’m very sensitive to anti-Semitism. Nothing anti-Semitic was said.” He added: “There was no reason not to let them shout until their voices went out.”[From the May 1930 issue: Hypocrisy–a defense]As one experienced senior administrator at a major research university told me, the conflagration we are witnessing shows how little many university presidents understand either their campus communities or the young people who populate them. “When I saw what Columbia was doing, my immediate thought was: They have not thought about day two,” he said, laughing. “If you confront an 18-year-old activist, they don’t back down. They double down.” That’s what happened in 1968, and it’s happening again now. Early Tuesday morning, Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall—the site of the 1968 occupation, which they rechristened Hind’s Hall in honor of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza—in response to the university’s draconian handling of the protests. They explicitly tied these events to the university’s past, calling out its hypocrisy on Instagram: “This escalation is in line with the historical student movements of 1968 … which Columbia repressed then and celebrates today.” The university, for its part, responded now as it did then: Late on Tuesday, the NYPD swarmed the campus in an overnight raid that led to the arrest of dozens of students.The students, professors, and administrators I’ve spoken with in recent days have made clear that this hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed and that the crackdown isn’t working, but making things worse. The campus resistance has expanded to include faculty and students who were originally more ambivalent about the protests and, in a number of cases, who support Israel. They are disturbed by what they rightly see as violations of free expression, the erosion of faculty governance, and the overreach of administrators. Above all, they’re fed up with the incandescent hypocrisy of institutions, hoisted with their own progressive petards, as the unstoppable force of years’ worth of self-righteous rhetoric and pseudo-radical posturing meets the immovable object of students who took them at their word.In another video published by The Cornell Daily Sun, recorded only hours after he was suspended, Nick Wilson explained to a crowd of student protesters what had brought him to the school. “In high school, I discovered my passion, which was community organizing for a better world. I told Cornell University that’s why I wanted to be here,” he said, referencing his college essay. Then he paused for emphasis, looking around as his peers began to cheer. “And those fuckers admitted me.”