This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.I find it exhausting to have to point out that Donald Trump has—yet again—threatened to engage in violent and dictatorial behavior, and that—yet again—the collective reaction by some in America seems to be a numb acceptance that this is just who Trump is.But as I wrote this past spring, Trump’s goal is to exhaust people who care about democracy: That’s why he regularly inundates the nation with his rancid word salads. His screeds are aimed at making us all so tired that when he actually attempts to carry out these schemes, we’ll hardly have the energy to notice. Oh, he’s ordering Homeland Security to arrest people in unconstitutional dragnets? Yeah, I’ve been hearing stuff about that for a long time.Here is part of what he posted early Saturday evening over at his personal rantatorium, Truth Social: CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. This post is the 45th president of the United States putting in writing that he must win, and that after he wins, he will mobilize the machinery of government against his opponents because there was clearly fraud anyway.(I will just note that I refuse to believe that Trump really coughed up a word like skulduggery on his own. Spelling it incorrectly does point to him, but the likelihood that someone else is writing these posts is a reminder that Trump is surrounded by people who have no objections to his plans and will willingly carry them out.)Some of this was drowned out by Trump’s other deranged statements last week. Just before he issued his Stalinist threats, he dropped a piece of pure weapons-grade nuttery about kids getting gender-changing surgery during a normal school day in America. “Can you imagine you’re a parent,” he said at a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, “and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”You cannot imagine it because it’s never happened. Any parent knows that most schools completely plotz if they even have to give a kid some ibuprofen, but on Planet Trump, school nurses can apparently do surgery in the office. At the same rally, Trump threatened to round up undocumented immigrants en masse and admitted it would be a “bloody story.”To recap: In one day, Trump threatened the use of mass government violence inside the United States, asserted that kids are getting secret medical procedures at schools, and promised to lock up his political opponents. One might reasonably assume that when Trump takes the stage with Vice President Kamala Harris tomorrow night, the first thing the moderators will ask is: Are you out of your mind?Well, maybe not in those words, exactly. But the very first question at the debate should reflect a basic paradox in this election: How can any meeting between Trump and Harris be a “debate” if Trump has already made clear that he rejects the foundations of the American system of government?Debates are based on good faith and shared assumptions about democracy. Trump bellows at us, over and over, that he couldn’t give a damn about any of that. He’s running because he wants to stay out of prison, get revenge on his enemies, exercise untrammeled power, and gain access to even more money. Are we really expecting a give-and-take about, say, child care (a subject on which Trump was spectacularly incoherent a few days ago) between a candidate who will govern as a traditional president and a would-be junta leader who intends to jail his opponents—including, possibly, the woman standing next to him and the reporters grilling him?I can’t give you a lot of headlines about all of these mad comments because, for the most part, they don’t exist. (Reuters summed up the raving on Saturday as “Trump Revs Up Small-Town Base in Wisconsin,” which is true, in the way that a 1967 headline saying Mao Encourages Chinese Intellectuals to Aid With Agricultural Efforts would be true but perhaps incomplete.) The New York Times had nothing about Trump’s weekend comments on its front page today. This morning’s Washington Post homepage simply said: “Harris Hunkers Down for ‘Debate Camp,’ Trump Opts for ‘Policy Sessions’ as Showdown Looms.” This headline is no doubt an accurate account of what’s happening in the campaigns, but “Trump says he will inevitably win and prosecute his opponents for fraud anyway” is probably more important than whether he is being briefed yet again on policies he doesn’t care about or understand.Politico, meanwhile, boldly suggested yesterday that the “shadow of Tulsi Gabbard” now “looms” over Harris. Yes, if there’s one thing we’re all wondering, it’s how the shadow of …Wait, what? Tulsi Gabbard?For those of you not steeped in the current weirdness of American politics, Gabbard is the former representative from Hawaii who was masquerading for a few years as a standard Democrat before quitting her job in Congress and coming out as a fringy attention seeker. In a 2019 Democratic primary debate, she managed to rough up Harris on a question about crime.When Harris is about to step onstage with Trump—a convicted felon, the instigator of a violent insurrection, and an avowed threat to democracy—does anyone at Politico believe that millions of Americans are tuning in and thinking Gosh, I remember that big Tulsi Gabbard moment; I wonder if that shadow is looming here?Several writers at The Atlantic, including our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, have raised the issue of the “bias toward coherence” that prevents many journalists—and millions of Americans—from saying out loud that the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States is emotionally unstable and a menace to the Constitution. This is not going to change in the next two months. But if Trump’s comments this weekend are not the first questions at the debate—if his threat to democracy is not the only question—then there is no point in debates at all.Related: Trump promises a “bloody story.” A new level of incoherence, even for Trump Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Mark Leibovich: Hypocrisy, spinelessness, and the triumph of Donald Trump Pro-life voters are politically homeless. Trump called Harris “beautiful.” Now he has a problem. Break up Big Econ, David Deming argues. Today’s News Congress has until September 30 to come to a stopgap agreement about federal-government funding in order to avoid a government shutdown. The Justice Department charged two people from California with leading a white-supremacist group that allegedly plotted to assassinate “high-value” targets and incite a race war. The Line wildfire in Southern California has grown to cover more than 21,000 acres, forcing school closures and evacuations. Dispatches Work in Progress: A niche pro-housing movement has convinced mainstream Democrats of the need to build, Jerusalem Demsas writes. The Weekly Planet: An Austrian man with multiple sclerosis could be the first person in the world to have their personal harms from climate change be recognized as a violation of their human rights, Zoë Schlanger reports. The Wonder Reader: Life can feel too busy to see our friends. But there are ways to pursue friendships that suit your particular stage in life, Isabel Fattal writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Photograph by Brad Wilson Do Animals Know That They Will Die?By Ross Andersen Moni the chimpanzee was still new to the Dutch zoo when she lost her baby. The keepers hadn’t even known that she was pregnant. Neither did Zoë Goldsborough, a graduate student who had spent months jotting down every social interaction that occurred among the chimps, from nine to five, four days a week, for a study on jealousy. One chilly midwinter morning, Goldsborough found Moni sitting by herself on a high tree stump in the center of her enclosure, cradling something in her arms. That she was by herself was not surprising: Moni had been struggling to get along with the zoo’s 14 other chimps. But when Goldsborough edged closer, she knew that something was wrong. Moni had a newborn, and it wasn’t moving. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic How the GOP went from Reagan to Trump What settler violence is doing to Israel A food-allergy fix hiding in plain sight A book that puts the life back in biography Culture Break Neon Rated Watch. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, a popular educational game first released in 1987, ushered a generation of kids onto the computer. Seeking Mavis Beacon (out now in theaters) is a documentary about what happened next.Read. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and James are two “deep and excellent” novels worth reading back-to-back, Michael Powell shares.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Donald Trump has a remarkably binary view of the world: Walls are good; migrants are bad. Tariffs are good; taxes are bad. People who love Trump are good; those who don’t are bad. And women are hot—or not.Trump cares about everyone’s looks, of course. But as a former owner of the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants, he is a self-proclaimed expert on women’s beauty. He spent multiple appearances on The Howard Stern Show rating women on a numeric scale. You can see him, like a teenage boy, sizing up every woman he encounters.This is boorish, of course, but politically, it has proved useful. When he thinks a woman is unattractive, Trump has an easy way to dismiss her. He rips her apart. Carly Fiorina, he said, had “that face”: “Would anyone vote for that?” He once tweeted: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” He reportedly wouldn’t make Nikki Haley secretary of state because of “blotch marks on her cheeks”: “She’s not good for me. She’s got that complexion problem.” (He calls himself a “skin man.”) During their primary battle this year, he insinuated that Haley’s husband—a National Guardsman who was deployed to the Horn of Africa—had run out on her. He’s extended this same bullying strategy to his legal issues. His main line of defense in his civil trial for the rape and sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll was that she was not “his type.” (Jurors found him responsible for the latter charge.)Depressingly, this has been pretty effective. Erotic appeal is a form of power that Trump seems to actually respect. By declaring these women undesirable, Trump has portrayed them not just as bossy, unattractive shrews, but as weak.[From the January/February 2024 issue: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]When Trump thinks a woman is hot, however, the situation gets a lot more complicated. And Trump thinks Kamala Harris, whom he will face for the first time onstage in tomorrow’s debate, is a certified hottie. He told Elon Musk in an interview that Harris, on the cover of Time, looked like “the most beautiful actress ever to live,” comparing her favorably to his own—presumably hot—wife, Melania. “I think we finally found the one thing Trump is incapable of lying about,” Desi Lydic joked in a Daily Show segment about the interview. “If he thinks someone is hot, he’ll say they’re hot. He’ll lie about winning an election, but he has deep respect for the sanctity of bangability.”Still, there’s an election to try to win, so Trump is forced to take a different line of attack: suggesting that because a woman is beautiful, she must be dumb, and if she’s successful nonetheless, that’s only because she slept her way to the top. He’s used this strategy before too. He called Megyn Kelly a bimbo and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “not even a smart person.” He said Mika Brzezinski had a “low I.Q.” and implied that she had made it to Morning Joe only because she was dating her co-host. He told a female reporter once, “You wouldn’t have this job if you weren’t beautiful,” and wrote that “early victories by the women on The Apprentice were, to a very large extent, dependent on their sex appeal.” And so now Vice President Harris is “dumb as a rock,” “really DUMB,” “VERY STUPID,” and so on. She only got this far, he has said, thanks to a romantic entanglement she had with the mayor of San Francisco almost 30 years ago, and she “doesn’t have the mental capacity to do a REAL Debate.”This probably works on some people, but it’s hard to persuade the general public to dismiss observed intelligence in women just because they are conventionally attractive. On a dumber level, sexualizing women backfires because it reinforces the idea that women have a form of power. And it reveals that that power is working—even over Trump. Because when it comes to beautiful women, Trump is a lover, not a fighter.[David A. Graham: He could have talked about anything else]We make so much of Trump’s sexism that we seem to dismiss Trump’s sexuality—and his open obsession with it. His comments about women are demeaning, but they are also lascivious. He’s a civilly convicted sexual abuser who has described his lack of impulse control around beautiful women on multiple occasions. As he told Billy Bush on the Access Hollywood tape, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]. I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet.” Lest we think age is slowing him down, just this year he told a female supporter at Mar-a-Lago, “All these beautiful women, you’re driving me crazy.” He accompanied this with an emphatic gesture. Had his hand been just a few inches closer to the woman, he might have grabbed something. He honestly can’t seem to help himself: These women are more powerful than he is. “I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part,” he wrote in The Art of the Comeback. A famous germophobe, he’s always been terrified of STDs, but he still can’t help himself: “If you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam—it’s called the dating game,” he told Stern, and vaginas are “potential land mines.”One really gets the impression that Trump would prefer not to be on the wrong side of any woman he’s deemed hot. Maybe one day, we can have a politics where female candidates aren’t judged by their physical appearance. Harris, unlike Clinton, has so far downplayed her gender, but Trump can’t see past it. Given where we are, it matters that Harris’s attractiveness is a challenge that Trump hasn’t figured out how to solve. It must make him nervous. If he finds Harris alluring, there is no doubt in his mind that America will too. After all, he’s the expert.

Moni the chimpanzee was still new to the Dutch zoo when she lost her baby. The keepers hadn’t even known that she was pregnant. Neither did Zoë Goldsborough, a graduate student who had spent months jotting down every social interaction that occurred among the chimps, from nine to five, four days a week, for a study on jealousy. One chilly midwinter morning, Goldsborough found Moni sitting by herself on a high tree stump in the center of her enclosure, cradling something in her arms. That she was by herself was not surprising: Moni had been struggling to get along with the zoo’s 14 other chimps. But when Goldsborough edged closer, she knew that something was wrong. Moni had a newborn, and it wasn’t moving.Goldsborough raced downstairs to a room where the zookeepers were preparing food for the chimps, and told them what she’d seen. At first, they didn’t believe her. They said that Moni was probably just playing with some straw. After the keepers saw the baby with their own eyes, they entered the enclosure and tried to take it away from her. Moni wouldn’t part with it. They decided to wait and try again.By this point, another female chimp named Tushi was lingering nearby. Tushi was one of Goldsborough’s favorites. A few years earlier, she’d achieved global fame for executing a planned attack on a drone that was recording the chimps for a documentary. Long before that, she’d had a miscarriage of her own. For Tushi, the sight of Moni and her baby may have brought back that memory, or even just its emotional contours. For the next two days, she stayed near Moni, who held the tiny carcass. Finally, in a tussle with the keepers, it fell from Moni’s grasp and Tushi snatched it up and refused to give it back. Moni grew extremely agitated. The keepers separated Tushi in a private room. Moni pounded at the door.Goldsborough wasn’t sure how to interpret this behavior. Moni seemed to have been driven by fierce maternal attachment, an emotion that is familiar to humans. Tushi could have been responding to an echo of this feeling from deep in her past. But it’s not clear that either of the chimps really understood what had happened to the baby. They may have mistakenly believed that it would come back to life. It’s telling that we can’t say for certain, even though chimpanzees are among our nearest—and most closely watched—neighbors on the tree of life.This past June, more than 20 scientists met at Kyoto University for the largest-ever conference on comparative thanatology—the study of how animals experience death. The discipline is small, but its literature dates back to Aristotle. In 350 B.C.E., he wrote about a pair of dolphins that he’d seen gliding beneath the surface of the Aegean Sea, supporting a dead calf, “trying out of compassion to prevent its being devoured.” Most of the literature in comparative thanatology consists of anecdotes like these. Some are short, like Aristotle’s, but others, like the story of Moni and her baby, which was published in the journal Primates in 2019, and to which we shall return, contain extraordinary social details.Scientists would like to go beyond these isolated scenes. They want to understand what feelings surge inside animals when they lose kin. They want to know whether animals are haunted by death, as we are. But they’re hampered by certain practicalities. They cannot interview animals (or at least not yet). They can monitor their hormonal shifts—baboon cortisol levels spike when they lose someone close—but these can be triggered by other stressors. They don’t give us the texture and grain of their grief, if indeed it is grief that they feel.[Read: How first contact with whale civilization could unfold]So far, the best comparative-thanatology data has come from observations of animals in the wild or captive populations in zoos. But here, too, there are problems. The species that react most interestingly to death—the usual suspects: nonhuman primates, whales, and elephants—have long lifespans. Their communities don’t lose individuals very often. Capturing systematic data about their reactions to death tends to require years’ or decades’ worth of work.Alecia Carter, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University College of London, told me that she has identified a colony of more than 1,000 rhesus macaques on Cayo Santiago, an island off Puerto Rico, that would be perfect for such a study. The monkeys are highly social, and tend to live for 15 or 20 years—long enough to form deep relationships, but not so long that their deaths would be too few and far between. As a start, one of Carter’s grad students recently spent nearly a summer there collecting data. Only 11 monkeys died. “It was a great season for them, but terrible for us,” Carter said.Humans have spent months in steamy jungles or zoo enclosures, dodging feces, to pursue this work. We are death-obsessed animals, after all, and have been since the dawn of recorded history, if not before. Our oldest work of epic literature tells the story of King Gilgamesh and his struggle with mortality. “Death is sitting in my bedroom, and wherever I turn, there too is death,” he says, before setting out in search of a plant that promises immortality. Human cultures have devised richly symbolic rituals to precede death and to follow it. For more than 10,000 years, we have laid our lost children in the ground, surrounded by flowers. We are a species of faithful mausoleum attendants, pyramid builders, inventors of the three-volley salute. We have imagined a great many afterlives for our dead, in heaven above or here on Earth aboard the great turning wheel of reincarnation. We have sicced our philosophers, armed with fine distinctions and caveats, on death; their definition of it now runs to more than 10,000 words. We have even projected our finitude onto the universe itself. Scientists tell us that it too will die after the last galaxies unwind and the black holes evaporate, particle by particle, trillions upon trillions of years from now.These elaborate human conceptions of death are not passed down through our genes. They develop over decades in the minds of individuals, and in our cultures, they accrete over centuries. Human children tend to learn that death is not a temporary or reversible state somewhere between the ages of 4 and 7, or a bit earlier if they lose a beloved family member or animal. A 2004 paper in Cognition argued that, at this developmental stage, children understand death as a permanent loss of agency.[Read: ]A Journey Into the Animal MindIn her new book Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death, the Spanish philosopher Susan Monsó argues that many other animals likely share this simple concept of death. That may seem like common sense, but without access to their minds, it is difficult to know for sure. Mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and insects are all cognizant of agency in the natural world. They monitor their environments for movement. They distinguish between inanimate objects and those that crawl or swim in pursuit of some goal. And some of them behave in ways that suggest an understanding that other animals can lose this agency forever. The hard part is knowing whether these behaviors flow from a conceptual recognition of death, or if they’re simply instincts.Consider the termite. At the June meeting in Kyoto, an urban entomologist at LSU named Qian Sun presented a paper on the corpse-management practices of the eastern subterranean variety. More than 1 million of these insects may pack into labyrinthine underground colonies that sprawl for hundreds of feet. When worker termites come across a dead colleague in one of the colony’s tunnels, they react in different ways, depending on the state of the corpse. Fresh ones, they devour. Old and moldering ones, they bury. Other social insects that live in close quarters engage in similar practices. (Aristotle noted that bees carry their dead out of the hive.) But these behaviors don’t appear to be driven by a concept of death. Termite corpses produce oleic acid, which appears to trigger the burial behavior, as it does in several different social insects. When E. O. Wilson dabbed this chemical onto a live ant, its fellow colony members did not pause to consider whether the still-moving animal had suffered a permanent loss of agency. They simply carried it outside, even as it kicked its legs in protest.Chimps are not termites. Their large, complex brains are better-equipped to entertain a concept like death, and there is evidence to suggest that they feel something like grief. Several species of nonhuman primates have been known to gather around a community member that has recently died. In many cases, they will touch its body gently. These gatherings tend to dissipate slowly and in a patterned way: the individuals who were closest to the deceased animal stay longest. Jane Goodall observed an eight-year-old chimp lingering by his dead mother so long that he died, too.Other mammals also tend to congregate around their dead. When giraffes do it, they swing their long necks at scavengers to keep them at bay. In India, the bodies of five young elephants have been found with branches and dirt scattered over them, leading some scientists to suggest that they’d been buried. André Gonçalves, an expert in comparative thanatology from Kyoto University, cautioned me about making too much of this anecdote. The elephants were found in trenches that they may have fallen into, he said. The dirt and branches could have piled up as family members tried desperately to dig them out.In her book, Monsó argues that too much has been made of all these grief responses. She reminds her readers that animals live in a bloody world where predators pounce in the dark of night, or plunge down, talons-first, from unseen heights. The lurid violence of their environment provides a rich text for understanding death. Monsó imagines a young stag watching a dominance struggle between two older bucks. After their horns crack together a few times too many, the weaker combatant fails to get up. The young stag begins to understand the basics of mortality. If the lesson doesn’t take, he will likely have many occasions to relearn it.[Read: There are no ‘five stages’ of grief]This education would presumably be accelerated in carnivores, who see death frequently and at close range. Gonçalves told me that he’s not so sure. Many animals eat other animals while they are still alive, he said. It’s not clear that they are trying to bring about death, or that they conceive of it as a separate state of being. They might simply be trying to get a moving food source into their mouths, like frogs that shoot their sticky tongues at everything moth-like, just as a matter of reflex. Gonçalves noted that even the precise one-bite kills deployed by big cats are instinctual, not learned behaviors.Among chimpanzees, acts of wanton violence, up to and including murder, suggest a deeper understanding of death. Like wolves and lions—and people—chimps sometimes team up to kill members of rival groups. These attacks can have an air of premeditation. Two or three males will cross into terrain occupied by another group. They will move quickly and with stealth, and won’t stop to eat, even when passing by prime food sources. They target lone victims, and coordinate their attacks to avoid sustaining bruises or cuts of their own. In some cases, they will keep on striking long after a victim has signaled submission and let up only when the unlucky animal has ceased to breathe.If indeed chimpanzees do have a concept of death, it is not as layered or intricate as ours; that much is certain. Humans know what death is, and we know that someday it will happen to us. James Anderson, an emeritus professor at Kyoto University, who is widely regarded as the godfather of comparative thanatology, has argued that chimps do not have a similar sense of their own mortality. He does not believe that anyone has ever really seen a chimp attempt suicide, in all the many thousands of hours that we have observed them. According to Anderson, only an animal that knows that it can die will try to bring about its own death. That there are no reliable reports of chimps, he says, or any other animals, engaging in this behavior suggests that the existential burden of mortality is uniquely ours to carry.Anderson doesn’t know for sure, of course. Comparative thanatologists aren’t really in the business of giving answers, at least not yet. They can tell us that a chimp’s conception of death is grander than a termite’s, but much else is mysterious and maybe always will be. We can only hope that by continuing to watch chimps, we will notice new behaviors that betray a bit more of their interiority, or at least give us new grounds to speculate. The story of Moni and her baby may be one of them. Before coming across it, I’d read many papers about the way that chimps react to their deceased, but very few about how they treat the bereaved.After the zookeepers got Tushi alone, they decided to let things cool off. They kept her away from the others until the next day. In the meantime, for Moni, everything had changed. She had previously struggled to connect with her fellow chimps in the enclosure. She had a way of pulling other females’ fur too hard during grooming, and she often sat too close to them, staring awkwardly. On the day that Tushi rejoined the group, Moni was surrounded by the other chimps. When she saw Tushi, she leapt up to perform an aggressive threat display. She even slapped her.Tushi didn’t fight back, and in the 30 days that followed, she and the other chimps interacted with Moni more than they ever had before. No other chimp experienced an equivalent increase in attention. Almost all of the chimps contributed. They embraced Moni and gave her extra body kisses. But they did not contribute equally. Some cared for Moni more than others, and none more than Tushi. Something important seems to have passed between the two chimps. A few months later, things largely went back to normal in the enclosure. Moni stopped getting extra kisses. The males started bullying her again. But she and Tushi still often sat together. Even today, I am told, they remain close.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

When the filmmaker Jazmin Jones was growing up, she thought of Mavis Beacon—the face of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, a popular educational game first released in 1987—as a living and breathing celebrity. “Mavis” was an attractive Black woman with slicked-back hair, seen on the box art exuding warm, approachable authority in her corporate clothing and radiant smile. She held a child’s hand in a photo on the cover’s inside flap, guiding him down a sidewalk. With her positive attitude, she made typing on a QWERTY keyboard seem accessible, not intimidating. She was “like Santa Claus,” Jones told me in January at the Sundance Film Festival. “When I was hanging out with her as a child, she was real.”Except “Mavis” was never real, just an avatar who amiably interacted with users, leading many of them to believe she was an actual typing wiz. The Software Toolworks, the developer behind the game, didn’t dispel this notion: Mavis had become the rare Black female role model in the computer-programming space and was reaching Black consumers in a way that other games had not. Teachers called the company asking for her. She received countless requests for in-person speaking engagements. Children looked up to her.The truth is, Mavis was played by a Haitian model named Renée L’Esperance. The game’s white male creators said in interviews that they hadn’t intended at first to cast a Black woman in the role; they’d merely stumbled upon L’Esperance while she was working behind a perfume counter at a Saks Fifth Avenue store and thought she’d look great as their game’s main character. L’Esperance agreed to pose for a photo shoot and earned $500—but after Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing became a best seller in the 1990s, and she became a recognizable figure, L’Esperance abandoned the spotlight. A Seattle Times article reported in 1995 that L’Esperance had moved back to the Caribbean. The game’s creators told Vice in 2015 they’d all simply lost touch with her.[Read: A movie that understands the 2000s-internet generation]L’Esperance herself never publicly spoke about Mavis or left a digital footprint. In the documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon, now in theaters, Jones and her collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross, a computer programmer and artist, attempt to find out what happened to L’Esperance—and maybe even track her down for an on-camera interview. The self-proclaimed “DIY e-girl detectives” embark upon an investigation that mixes traditional and atypical methods: Jones and Ross conduct interviews with people who might have known L’Esperance, as well as with artists, critics, and even psychics who might help them more abstractly connect with her. The duo probe the internet for clues to her whereabouts, while scouring social media for insight into Mavis’s legacy. Using talking heads and staged scenes, the documentary blends fact with fiction. The filmmakers told me they wanted to explore how someone who essentially deserted the internet can still influence an extremely online generation. Jones said of the project: “It was pitched as, ‘We’re gonna find the real person, and we’re going to make a more embellished, more nuanced backstory for Mavis Beacon.’”To Jones and Ross, L’Esperance’s story embodies many tensions inherent to establishing our online selves. How does our identity transform when our image is distributed and replicated? Can tools like AI be truly humane, and who benefits from them the most? If we, like L’Esperance, don’t build our own digital histories, do others get to fill in the blanks for us without our consent? The result of their findings is an unconventional documentary that unfolds like the internet itself, gleefully falling down rabbit holes and going on tangents as it studies our ever-changing, uncontrollable relationship with technology.Jones and Ross were hopeful that, after all these years, L’Esperance would share their enthusiasm for examining her singular place in tech history. Yet as they made the film, their work began to raise existential questions about technology that threatened their optimism. The model’s apparent disappearance felt like a pointed rebuke to the internet’s reach. The possibility that their project would force L’Esperance into the digital space, where our footprints have become impossible to fully erase, contributed to the filmmakers’ own growing unease about their online sleuthing.Jones and Ross came close to constructing a profile of L’Esperance. The two were remarkably successful in their investigative efforts: They tracked down the creators of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, spoke with the then-girlfriend of one of them (who had actually spotted L’Esperance first), and found evidence that L’Esperance had taken legal action against The Software Toolworks. Yet the filmmakers also waded into murkier territory, opening what Jones called a “Pandora’s box” of ethical issues. To promote their film, Jones and Ross kept having to use images from L’Esperance’s initial photo shoot for the game’s first edition. The language in their social-media posts about L’Esperance’s disappearance risked encouraging others to initiate their own, potentially more harmful investigations. In addition, they’d made deepfakes when they first began the project in 2018—they’d wanted to imagine how a “real” Mavis Beacon would have lived—and employed AI to help with their search, but, over time, these tools started to feel “horrifying” to dabble in. As queer Black artists, the filmmakers found that the more they tried capturing what L’Esperance’s image meant for a generation of Black women, the more they projected their own hopes onto a person they’d never met. And the longer L’Esperance herself remained hidden, the more their quest resembled an obsessive hunt, like a web-based conspiracy theory gone haywire.As such, Seeking Mavis Beacon eventually stops being about uncovering what happened to L’Esperance. Instead, it turns toward the discovery Jones and Ross make, which is an empathetic one: As they capture their own stumbles and successes on camera, they find that there’s always a gap between who they are and how their audience might receive them, even though they’re spearheading the project. They’re able to connect with what L’Esperance might have felt, seeing herself flattened into a two-dimensional mascot whose name overshadowed L’Esperance’s own.[Read: We’ve lost the plot]The question of how to use images responsibly isn’t new, but in our era of endless transmission and surveillance, even a project meant to honor someone can become more than a little exploitative. The conundrum derives from the lack of agency we have over our digital selves. As hard as it may be to delete all traces of our virtual footprints, Jones said, the internet is also “forgetting about us in real time.” Her own Myspace profile has been taken offline, she pointed out, along with her Photobucket account and several old YouTube videos. Ross called such removal “data trauma,” a term underlining the profound pain that can come from the loss of content we created and hadn’t fully understood could become irretrievable one day. “The things that are actually our cultural heritage are disappearing,” Ross said. “The facts about us that are useful for corporations stay.”Still, in trying to build a portrait of L’Esperance (a person) out of “Mavis Beacon” (a product), Jones and Ross encountered an uncomfortable truth: that perhaps they were taking advantage of her loss of control online, just as they’d experienced in their own lives. The pair made assumptions about why L’Esperance moved away from the States. They presumed her relationship with the internet was the same as theirs. They believed she had to be a Mavis-like role model without ever having met her. Jones started clearly seeing these disconnects as their search for L’Esperance progressed. “If it were up to me, you know, Mavis Beacon would be a queer exotic dancer,” she said, laughing. “But it’s like, there’s a real person who has real feelings, and they might not like this story that we’ve created and applied.”That’s the kind of approach Ross hopes more people bring to their online encounters. For years, she’s called herself a cyber doula—a “corny term,” she told me, but one she feels captures how people should think more emotionally and carefully about the internet’s expansiveness. Seeking Mavis Beacon is in some ways part of that effort, the project’s own transformation a proof of concept that someone can determine how to use the internet responsibly, to prioritize humanity before results. Just because Jones and Ross were able to locate L’Esperance didn’t mean they had to drag her in front of the camera or divulge every detail about her whereabouts; indeed, they chose not to. Perhaps the early-Facebook-era catchphrase “Move fast and break things” should be reversed, Jones joked: “Let’s just move slow and heal things, please.”[Read: How early computer games influenced internet culture]Although many different models have played Mavis Beacon since L’Esperance initially graced the game’s cover, the character hasn’t changed much in the past 37 years. That any of us saw her as a real person is owed to a very human flaw, Seeking Mavis Beacon posits—a glitch in our system. We’ve developed habits that the internet has encouraged: to anthropomorphize the artificial, iterate on images, click and scroll and type and customize until we lose track of our search history and ourselves. But we can reject those instincts, too, and return to basics—to understand what technologies are meant to be used for, and learn how to do so accordingly. That was the point of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, after all, Ross said. “I was just like, ‘Mavis Beacon is teaching typing’—this is true,” she explained of her first impression of the game. “‘Mavis Beacon teaches typing’ is a full sentence.” And Mavis Beacon—real or not—doesn’t have to offer anything else.

The backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision led to a rise in public support for abortion rights, yet four in 10 U.S. Americans still identify as pro-life. Of the voters who claim that abortion is their most important issue (12 percent of all voters), the health-care nonprofit KFF found that 34 percent think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.But we’re a constituency without a political home. As a pro-life academic and activist who has worked on these issues for three decades, I find neither major-party candidate in this presidential election acceptable. The Republican Party has rejected our point of view. Democrats are running a candidate who has made abortion rights a centerpiece of her campaign, and whose stance on the issue would make most of the rest of the world blush. Pro-lifers—those who believe that protecting vulnerable and unborn life should be a primary policy priority—now do not fit in either major political party. And this is good, actually.Former President Donald Trump no longer has a convincing case for why pro-lifers should vote for him. Roe has fallen. What else could pro-life voters gain by continuing to support the GOP? This time around, we’ve been given no list of friendly judges to be nominated, no support from the Republican convention, only a platform process (apparently led by Trump himself) that marginalized pro-lifers and rammed through language that did not condemn the overwhelming majority of abortions. Trump also recently posted on Truth Social that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights” and said that he does not support the six-week abortion ban in his home state of Florida.[From the December 2019 issue: The dishonesty of the abortion debate]This is bad enough to cause a huge rift, but most pro-lifers do not care about abortion alone. Many have views on nonviolence and protection of the vulnerable that lead them to also care about, for instance, issues such as physician-assisted suicide. The 2016 GOP platform said, “We oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide,” yet the 2024 GOP platform does not. Recent reporting on Trump’s views on these matters may shed some light on the change: In a new book, his nephew claims Trump suggested that disabled people (including his nephew’s son) should be euthanized. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die,” he reportedly said. Does it follow that pro-lifers should vote for Democrats? A Kamala Harris–led party will almost certainly push for good things such as increased resources for child care, paid family leave, and long-term care for older adults and people with disabilities.Speaking as a former board member of Democrats for Life, I can say there was a time when this approach would have made sense. Gallup polls suggest that, until 2012, a solid third of Democrats identified as pro-life, and those voters put many pro-life Democrats into office. Some of them were prominent: For instance, the Casey in the famous 1992 Supreme Court abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey was Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, a strong pro-life Democrat. But today, Democrats are so antagonistic toward pro-lifers that they will work hard to keep us out of the party. A paltry 12 percent of Democrats identify as pro-life, and when Joe Manchin switched his party affiliation to independent, the Senate lost its last pro-life Democrat (and hardly any are left in the House). If current party leadership took a moderate position, supporting, say, European-style abortion restrictions (somewhere in the 12-to-16-week range), they could shift U.S. political structures in ways that would give them generational power. But so beholden is the current Democratic Party to the orthodoxy enforcers that it prioritizes the excommunication of dissenters over creating a winning coalition that could bring in millions of pro-life votes. But the dominant position of the party, as articulated by Harris (especially in her strong support for the Women’s Health Protection Act), is that abortion is no different from any other kind of medical procedure, and that legal limitations on it should have so many loopholes and exceptions as to be effectively nonexistent. Indeed, full-throated support for abortion could be Harris’s signature political issue. When Senator Elizabeth Warren was asked about Harris’s biggest accomplishment as vice president, for instance, she said it was Harris’s response to the Dobbs decision, including being the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic. Harris’s selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who supported and signed some of the most extreme abortion-rights legislation in the country, further demonstrates her commitment. The recently concluded Democratic National Convention featured several speakers championing abortion rights, and in Harris’s speech accepting the nomination, she said she would “proudly sign” a bill that restores “reproductive freedom.”[Read: Kamala Harris’s biggest advantage]So as a pro-life voter, I cannot support either major candidate. But I see this moment as an opportunity, and so could those who share my beliefs. For decades, we have made common cause with a GOP that has compromised our values again and again, which in turn has led many of our fellow citizens to distrust us and reject our movement, even in red states such as Kansas and Ohio.Pro-lifers ought therefore to return to our foundation and fundamentals, going back to the movement’s approach before Roe v. Wade, but updated for the current moment. Pro-life 3.0 must welcome people from multiple political and policy perspectives, work for both prenatal justice and social support for women and families, and focus in particular on the hard, decades-long cultural work that will be necessary to shift the consumerist West from a culture that prioritizes wealth generation and individual happiness over collective health and safety toward one that embraces nonviolence and welcomes and protects the vulnerable.For those who don’t have the patience for this kind of work, and instead prefer to jump right to public policy, there is some low-hanging fruit: working for child tax credits and flexible work hours, addressing intimate-partner violence and coerced abortion, and stopping abortion from being pushed on disabled populations. Each of these policy goals could get significant buy-in from those who disagree with us about abortion overall.But we must not let passing laws, as important as this may be, pull us away from the foundational goals that have animated us for more than six decades. Staying grounded in nonviolence, protecting and caring for the most vulnerable, and welcoming those who are at risk of being thrown away will be essential if we have any hope of winning the culture.

For a poor, Black son of the South like me, beginning life in Jim Crow’s grip, the haughty, heady world of professional philanthropy might as well have been a different planet. When I first landed at the Rockefeller Foundation, I immersed myself in the history of the institution and the field. I read about the captains of industry, famously dubbed “robber barons” by muckrakers at The Atlantic: Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon and John Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford, whose namesake foundation I’ve been privileged to serve as president for the past 11 years.The standard line is that modern philanthropy traces its beginnings to 1889, when Carnegie wrote what we know as “The Gospel of Wealth.” In the face of rampant inequality, Carnegie proposed a bold idea: The wealthy, he argued, should freely give from their gains to aid “the masses”—though not the “unworthy” poor, whom he deemed too lazy and irresponsible to merit support. In fact, Carnegie accepted that inequality was a natural, even inevitable, by-product of capitalism, and so not a condition that philanthropy (itself a “creature of capitalism,” as Henry Ford II later said) bore any responsibility to address.[From the May 1929 issue: The principles of public giving]But here and there, I heard mentions of another name—Rosenwald—that was not included in the traditional pantheon of philanthropy’s founders, which piqued my curiosity.I began to explore. I asked the experts. Between meetings, I snuck downstairs to the in-house Rockefeller Foundation library to research.What I discovered was a radically different approach to philanthropy—and to the capitalism that at once precedes, enables, and necessitates it. In the life and leadership of Julius Rosenwald, our first social-justice philanthropist, I found a perhaps unlikely lodestar—an inspiration for my own work and my own way of working.I was born in August 1959, to a single mother in a Louisiana charity hospital. My mom, my sister, and I lived together in a small shotgun house—a shack, really—in rural East Texas.Throughout my childhood, I heard the name Rosenwald. I knew of the Rosenwald Schools, almost 5,000 in number, distributed across the old South. Once, they educated one out of every three Black children in the region, including Thurgood Marshall and John Lewis, Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou. I knew that the schools were synonymous with opportunity, advancement, and excellence.But the man behind the schools? I hadn’t a clue who he was.Decades later, after stints in law and finance and running a Harlem nonprofit, I found my own calling in philanthropy—and, as my fate would have it, I landed at one of the best-known philanthropies of them all, the venerable Rockefeller Foundation (established in 1913, around the time that Rosenwald started to build his schools).And so I set out to rediscover Julius Rosenwald. He was born, I learned, in Springfield, Illinois, in 1862, a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln’s residence. His German Jewish immigrant parents manufactured uniforms for Union officers, and they raised their son in the Reform temple where his father served as president.Together, they practiced a strand of socially conscious Judaism that emphasized the values of tzedakah, or “righteousness,” and tikkun olam, “repairing the world”—informed by the charge of Deuteronomy: Justice, justice shall you pursue.After an apprenticeship in Manhattan’s garment district, Rosenwald settled in Chicago. There, he sold men’s suits and eventually, in 1895, invested $75,000 (nearly $3 million today) in a 50 percent ownership stake in one of his distributors—a fledgling business called Sears, Roebuck, and Company. (Notably, he bought out the Roebuck of Sears Roebuck.)Rosenwald’s managerial and marketing ingenuity spurred the business to prodigious success, as America’s emerging middle class ordered clothing, kitchenware, and almost anything else they could imagine from the first mail-order catalog. One characteristic innovation from the young Rosenwald: printing a thicker catalog on smaller stock, so housewives would place it at the top of their pyramid of magazines in their kitchens or living rooms.In 1906, Congress authorized, and the Post Office implemented, a new rural delivery service, which ushered in a consumer-goods revolution. No longer were farmers required to trek into town for their mail. Riding the wave, Sears quickly became, in its own words, “the world’s largest store”—the Amazon of its time. And in 1908, Rosenwald became the president of Sears, ultimately amassing one of American history’s great fortunes.Rosenwald charted a middle course amid the extremes of the Gilded Age, steering between the gathering provocateurs who rejected capitalism on one side and the industrialists who exploited it on the other.His early-20th-century views don’t align perfectly with my own—he was, for example, anti-union. But in many other ways, Rosenwald was a champion of a more inclusive capitalism—a democratic capitalism—that aspired to strengthen the growing republic by mitigating inequality. His vision is more relevant than ever—more requisite, too—and in it, we can find seeds of our own repair and renewal.At Sears, Rosenwald offered a pioneering employee-benefits program, including competitive compensation, paid vacation and sick days, and reliable bonuses. Even more remarkably, he experimented with an early version of employee ownership, offering veteran employees the option to purchase company stock, which later evolved into an extensive profit-sharing program.Rosenwald attributed his success to “opportunity, enterprise, and luck,” not his own guile, guts, or genius. Unlike many of his era, he did not see wealth alone as proof of virtue. And he devoted his life to extending and expanding that opportunity and luck for others—both in making his fortune and in giving it away.As a philanthropist, Rosenwald gave significantly within his own communities—to Jewish and immigrant causes and Chicago institutions, including Jane Addams’s Hull House, the University of Chicago, and the Museum of Science and Industry. But he directed most of his giving toward ensuring, as he said in 1918, that Black Americans enjoy “an equal chance with the white man to climb as high … as their individual capacity warrants.”This was an audacious objective, given the state of Black America at the time. And one struggles to imagine John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, for instance, even contemplating such a project.[Read: Philanthropy serves the status quo]Rewind the clock to the eve of the Civil War: In 1860, the United States’ Black population numbered about 4.4 million. By 1900—35 years after slavery’s official demise—that population had doubled. And yet, at the turn of the century, nine out of every 10 African Americans lived in the South, three out of four ensnared in chattel slavery’s brutal successor institution, sharecropping. By custom and law, barely half could read or write. In many places across the South, state and local bodies had banned basic education in Black communities with formal anti-literacy legislation, to say nothing of the informal enforcement via a regime of racial terror.Against this painful, entrenched injustice, Rosenwald went to work, in close partnership with lifelong friends and colleagues such as Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, who was perhaps his most influential mentor and adviser from 1911 onward. In the segregated South, they collaborated with Black communities to build 4,978 public schools from 1912 to 1937. And as the dream of safety, dignity, and opportunity carried millions of Black Americans to the industrializing North during the Great Migration, Rosenwald, at Washington’s urging, provided for a range of organizations that would help transition the migrants into urban life—including the YMCA, the Urban League, and the NAACP. Students and teachers at Jefferson Jacob School, in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1920s (Carridder Jones Photograph Collection, The Filson Historical Society) Rosenwald’s relative obscurity today reflects an almost willful collective ignorance of Jewish American contributions to our democracy in general—and to progress for African Americans in particular—a pattern of erasure that we would be well served to acknowledge now, as new cleavages emerge between two communities that have been so essential to each other’s liberation.When I reflect on all of this, I cannot help but wonder about Rosenwald’s prescient sense of the duality—the convergences and divergences—of the Jewish and Black American experiences. Both Jewish and Black Americans were rendered inferior by the codes of American caste. Both suffered—in different ways, to different extents—from racial inequality and violence, from lynchings and pogroms. Both were diaspora communities—and in the North, at least, both were migrant communities, escaping poverty and persecution with little more than the shirt on their back and the hopes in their heart.Furthermore, Rosenwald discerned that as long as one community was vulnerable, so too was the other. And he held fast to the converse, as well: Integration and opportunity and prosperity for one would beget the same for both.In turn, I believe, he sensed that interracial, interfaith partnership would benefit not just one group or the other, but our shared American community. Ultimately, we are all the protagonists in a bigger American story—the story of a small circle of mostly white, Protestant, property-owning men in Philadelphia that, generation by generation, continues to grow wider because of the patriotic struggle and sacrifice of the people who were once excluded: Black and brown people, Indigenous people, Jewish people, Muslim people, women, queer people, disabled people.As remarkable as what Rosenwald did to repair his broken world was how he did it. He invested in what I call the three I’s: individuals, their ideas, and their institutions. For two decades, he handed out open-ended fellowships to Black Americans, including the likes of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Marian Anderson, and W. E. B. Du Bois—all told, three generations of important figures in the arts and sciences, both celebrated and unsung. He also invested in research that unlocked insights about how to improve the human condition, including better agricultural practices and breakthroughs in medicine and public health. And he invested in transformational organizations—hospitals and settlement houses and an array of civil-society organizations, whose work improved not just the day-to-day conditions of the dislocated, dispossessed, and disenfranchised, but also their longer-term opportunities for inclusion in the American project. Pine Grove School in Richland County, South Carolina, in 2018 (Andrew Feiler) [Read: How U.S. philanthropy is inspiring foreigners to give]Moreover and more broadly, Rosenwald approached his philanthropy with a set of commitments that powerfully inform my own. He sought, in his words, “permanent rather than palliative measures,” to address the root causes of inequality, not merely its symptoms. He said, “What I want to do is try and cure the things that seem wrong.” He didn’t say ameliorate or alleviate consequences. He said “cure”—and he meant it, even if curing the disease would implicate the people and systems that were engaged in the healing. This, too, was different in kind from the giving of Rockefeller and Carnegie, men who advocated for the “scientific philanthropy” that invested in research and discovery, while accepting racial hierarchies as normative.Rosenwald almost always invested more than dollars—finding ways to offer a full spectrum of resources and support for the people and organizations he cared about . He also insisted in many instances that his contributions be matched, not only by other philanthropists, but by the communities to which he gave (even if through nonmonetary means), so that those communities were meaningfully invested in each project’s success.And he listened to and learned from the people closest to the problems he was trying to solve—the people already putting solutions into practice—valuing lived experience as equal to established expertise.In all of these ways and others, Rosenwald represents a different branch of philanthropy’s phylogenetic tree, part of but also apart from the philosophies of philanthropy’s founders—the people about whom I learned when I started on my own journey through this strange world.Why was he forgotten? Unlike his fellow titans of industry, Rosenwald was a lifelong skeptic of endowments, as he argued in the pages of this very publication, and he insisted that his heirs spend down the assets he had directed to charity within 25 years of his death. The largest fund he created was dissolved in 1947. Many of his contemporaries dismissed this approach as apostasy. Rosenwald recognized, in a way that his fellow barons could not, that many endowments serve founders and funders, laundering their legacies, more effectively than the people and communities they purport to benefit.Throughout the 20th century, the field of institutional philanthropy flourished in Carnegie’s mold, not Rosenwald’s. American families—including many of today’s billionaire founders—endowed and expanded an extraordinary array of organizations that delivered 100 years of progress. By and large, their work has been a force for good; their collective impact, meaningful.At the same time, though, I believe that something about the old narrative arc should make us uneasy. Something about the old gospel should make us uncomfortable.As I see it, we cannot hide from the central contradiction built into our giving. We are creatures of our economic and social systems’ unequal benefits—and yet, we are charged with addressing their unequal outcomes. And the tension is particularly pronounced in this, our own gilded age—our own era of extremes, and inequalities, and extreme inequalities.Martin Luther King Jr.—one of relatively few Black leaders in the civil-rights movement’s vanguard who did not attend a Rosenwald School—summed this up perfectly. Six decades ago, he wrote, “Philanthropy is commendable. But it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice that make philanthropy necessary.”[Read: The importance of criticizing philanthropy]In other words, we must reckon with the inequality that makes philanthropy both necessary and possible: economic inequality, social inequality, religious inequality, racial inequality. This was Rosenwald’s project, as it ought to be our collective project today.Ultimately, Rosenwald’s unique story gives testament to the shared fate that binds us together. His legacy teaches us that although our atomized individual identities matter, our shared identity—our shared American values, our obligations to one another—matters most.Someone once asked Rosenwald, this modest Jewish clothier from Springfield, why he devoted such a significant portion of his benefaction to Black Americans. He replied simply, “I do not see how America can go ahead if part of its people are left behind.”Pirkei Avot, a rabbinic text on ethics, affirms that we are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it. Julius Rosenwald lived this precept to the fullest, embracing the hard work of hope. And this is why Rosenwald—the apotheosis of interracial, interfaith, interdependent solidarity—remains the indispensable philanthropist for our time, the hero hidden in plain sight all along.

Illustrations by Ben HickeyIn the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed.But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.[J. D. Vance: Donald Trump is an opioid for the masses]“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump told me the following spring, as he was completing his romp to the 2016 nomination. We were talking on the phone, and Trump had just wrapped up a rally in Anaheim, California. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry had recently endorsed him, despite dismissing Trump earlier as a “cancer on conservatism” and “a barking carnival act.”“He made a statement saying something like I’m ‘the smartest guy ever to run for office,’ ” Trump told me (Perry didn’t say exactly that, but close). “How do you get from ‘cancer on the party’ to that? I get it, I get it; it’s how politicians are. But I couldn’t do that.”Trump accepted Perry’s support, and then promptly taunted him. “He was going [around] saying the worst things about me!” Trump said at the Anaheim rally. “I have never seen people able to pivot like politicians.”“It’s happening with all of them,” Trump said. “Lindsey Graham just called and was very nice … even though he used to say the worst things.” (Graham had called Trump, among other not-nice things, “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” and “a kook.”) Soon enough, the last holdouts would come around too. “It’s just so easy, how they do that,” Trump said.As went individual Republican politicians, so went the party. Reince Priebus, the chair of the Republican National Committee in 2016, would become frustrated with Trump over his obvious scorn for his organization. Still, Priebus would gamely try to assure me that the GOP was shaped not by one man but rather by a set of traditions, principles, and conservative ideals. “The party defines the party,” Priebus kept telling me.After Trump won the nomination in 2016, “The party defines the party” became a familiar feckless refrain among the GOP’s putative leaders. House Speaker Paul Ryan vowed to me that he would “protect conservatism from being disfigured.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the radio host Hugh Hewitt that “Trump is not going to change the institution,” referring to the GOP. “He’s not going to change the basic philosophy of the party.”In retrospect, this was hilarious.By the second night of the 2024 Republican National Convention at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum in July, some attendees had started showing up with a gauze pad slapped over their right ears, a tribute to the boxy white dressing Trump wore to cover the injury he’d suffered in an attempt on his life in Pennsylvania just days earlier.The near miss had cast a peculiar aura over Trump’s jubilee in Milwaukee. For one thing, the bloodshed reaffirmed the popular Republican notion that Trump is a uniquely marked and defiant figure, as reflected by the T-shirts being sold depicting the wounded nominee raising his fist (as well as the still-fashionable mug-shot merchandise). But I spoke with several convention-goers who appeared stunned into a heightened sense of vulnerability by the event: Trump’s physical vulnerability, yes, but perhaps something shared as well. One could view the ear bandages in the crowd as a communal gesture of humanity, or even empathy.[From the January/February 2024 issue: Trump voters are America too]Whatever was behind them, the ear accessories quickly spread through the crowd and became ubiquitous. In a sense, the entire Republican Party has become an accessory. To no one’s surprise, everything in Milwaukee revolved around its unavoidable protagonist, “our 45th and soon-to-be 47th president, Donald J. Trump.”On the first night of the convention, Trump made what would become his familiar WWE-style entrance. His head filled the big screen as the Republicans’ official cantor, Lee “God Bless the U.S.A.” Greenwood, provided the walk-up sermon. “Prayer works,” Greenwood called out as Trump stood in the wings. And God ensured, “as Donald Trump turned his head just slightly, that the bullet missed him just enough.” Trump was then seen on-screen doing a quick twirl of his finger, the universal gesture for Let’s get on with this.“We have believed for so long that God will make some changes in this country,” Greenwood continued. (This was a few days before the other party’s God, Joe Biden’s “Lord Almighty,” would finally get through the White House switchboard.) Greenwood persisted in bestowing his blessings until Trump could wait no longer and began his slow walk onto the convention floor.The roar was colossal. Trump waved and clapped for himself. Everyone he passed stepped back in reflexive obedience, or awe. I’d been watching Trump’s adulators work the arena all week, trying to outdo one another. “My fellow Americans,” Senator Marco Rubio said from the podium while Trump—his Audience of One—squinted up at him like a building inspector. As with many other brand-name Republicans in the arena, Rubio had once despised Trump. He ran against him for president in 2016. It got ornery. Rubio implied that Trump had a small penis; Trump derided Rubio as “Liddle Marco” and called him “weak like a baby.” That last assessment held up well.“The only way to make America wealthy and safe and strong again is to make Donald J. Trump our president again,” Rubio declaimed from the podium. Trump nodded along from his center box, radiating pride of ownership—Liddle Marco had grown up so beautifully. Ben Hickey Not all that long ago, Rubio had told me that “we should not have cults of personality” in the U.S. His parents and grandparents had fled dictatorship in Cuba. Their journey made him appreciate the gift of freedom and the danger of strongmen.I talked a lot with Rubio in the last days of the 2016 primary, back when he was happy to speak candidly about Trump, and about how he knew better than to entrust the leadership of the United States to a “fraud,” “lunatic,” and “con artist” with autocratic instincts. And they all knew better—the Rubios, the Ted Cruzes, the J. D. Vances, the Doug Burgums, the Nikki Haleys, the Mitch McConnells, the Vivek Ramaswamys, all of them. They probably still know better. But they are all expedient, to their political core. “If you don’t want to get reelected,” Graham once told me, “you’re in the wrong business.”For years, many had predicted a reckoning, a shared realization that the noisy, grievance-packed redoubt that the GOP had become—marked by servile devotion to one man—was perhaps not aligned with the party’s best traditions of rugged, free-thinking individualists. “Anytime a leader builds an entire movement around himself, it almost always leads to disaster,” Rubio had told me.After so many party defections, electoral defeats, and broken spirits, surely some Republican self-correction was inevitable. But although there have been flashes, they haven’t lasted. I’ve heard all the private doubts about Trump from his most public of validators. These private doubts were once very public. “Mark my words, there will be prominent people in American politics who will spend years explaining to people how they fell into this,” Rubio told The New York Times in 2016, right before he “fell into this” himself.“I don’t think so,” Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, said during his Republican-primary campaign last year, when asked whether he would ever do business with Trump. “I just think it’s important that you’re judged by the company you keep.” Within a few months, however, Burgum would be eager to tell everyone what regular company he was keeping with Trump. “It’s been a real honor for Kathryn and I to have spent as much time with the president as we have,” Burgum said in June as he was auditioning to be Trump’s running mate.I’d thought that maybe 2024 would be the year the GOP finally began some semblance of a post-Trump future. At the very least, new voices of resistance had to finally assert themselves.“I feel no need to kiss the ring,” Nikki Haley, Trump’s most competitive primary challenger in 2024, had vowed in February. Haley even made what passed for a subversive remark in her convention speech, when she said that not everyone agrees with Trump all of the time. “That’s their problem,” someone yelled out from the crowd.But the ring, it would be kissed. “Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period,” Haley said.I ran into former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson on the arena concourse. He was one of the only Republican-primary challengers who dared question Trump’s worldview. His campaign had gone nowhere, but Hutchinson held relatively firm. “I’m troubled,” Hutchinson told me. “I don’t want our party to be defined by attacks on our judiciary system. I don’t want it to be defined by anger.”Hutchinson had previously distinguished himself as one of the few Republicans to have held elected office who said he would not vote for Trump. “I’ve made some commitments about not voting for a convicted felon,” Hutchinson conceded to ABC News later at the convention. Then he softened his position. “But that seems like a long time ago.”Also a long time ago: the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, where Ted Cruz had delivered his plucky “vote your conscience” speech in defiance of Trump, whom Cruz had called “utterly amoral” and “a sniveling coward.”“God Bless Donald J. Trump” is how Cruz’s speech in Milwaukee began. “Let me start by giving thanks to God Almighty for protecting President Trump,” he said, while the bandaged Almighty himself preened up at the sniveling coward onstage, who would follow him anywhere.Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020 had seemed certain to weaken Trump’s grip on the Republican Party, if not end his political career. No relevant precedent existed for any one-term president to become his party’s default front-runner in the next election. Especially not an extremely unpopular one-term president who lost by 7 million votes, refused to concede, incited a lethal insurrection in an attempt to overturn the result, was impeached for a second time, defied long-honored tradition by skipping the swearing-in of his successor, left behind a traumatized nation (with 25,000 National Guard troops defending the capital against his own supporters), became the first former president to be indicted … and the rest of the whole loser litany. LINDSEY GRAHAM2015: “You know how to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell”; “he is a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.”2016: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”2024 [To Trump]: “I love you.”(Kent Nishimura / Getty) TIM SCOTT2016: “If Donald Trump can’t take a stand against the KKK, we cannot trust him to stand up for America against Putin, Iran, or ISIS.”2024 [To Trump]: “I just love you.”(Eva Marie Uzcategui / Bloomberg / Getty) Yet the speed with which Trump has settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable—foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself. Because if there’s been one recurring lesson of the Trump-era GOP, it’s this: Never underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and—perhaps most of all—a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers (“weak like a baby”).“You know what I liked about Trump?” Lindsey Graham asked, waxing nostalgic about the former president—and yearning for his return—during a speech in Nashville in 2022. “Everyone was afraid of him. Including me.” It was a killer line, Graham in his amiable-mascot mode. It would also suffice as a preview of the 2024 Republican presidential primaries. “Resistance” to Trump, lame as it was, had become an inside joke among the party faithful.Trump’s last remaining primary challenger, Haley, quit the race on March 6. That same day, Mitch McConnell—who had criticized the then-president for his “disgraceful” conduct on January 6, 2021—endorsed Trump. Two days later, the spring meeting of the Republican National Committee, in Houston, featured a final address by the outgoing chair, Ronna McDaniel.McDaniel can get a little weepy at times, especially during goodbyes—or, in her case, an eviction. She started the job in 2017, the day before Trump delivered his mood-setting “American carnage” speech at his inauguration. She had done her best for Trump, taken so much of his abuse and carried so much of his water. She sacrificed her dignity, her reputation, her future employment prospects—even her dynastic family surname, Romney, because Uncle Mitt had fully established himself as a MAGA infidel. MARCO RUBIO2016: “Donald Trump is a con artist.” He is “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency.”2024: “The only way to make America wealthy and safe and strong again is to make Donald J. Trump our president again.”(Joe Raedle / Getty) TED CRUZ2016: Calls Trump a “pathological liar” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen.” Also says, “Donald, you are a sniveling coward.”2024: “God Bless Donald J. Trump.”(Noam Galai / Getty) The granddaughter of a Republican governor of Michigan (George Romney) and niece of her party’s last pre-Trump nominee (Mitt), McDaniel was always the wrong nepo baby for this dynasty. Yet she tried to adapt. She said all the right things and made herself MAGA-friendly and reliable, enough to persuade Trump to make her his RNC chair.Even then, McDaniel had to know that an inelegant end would come, as it usually does for even Trump’s most fervent flunkies and flatterers. She steadied herself at the podium on the fourth floor of the Hilton Americas–Houston, acknowledged her family, and gave a special nod to her staff. “Thank you for all your hard work to send our candidate, Donald J. Trump, back to the White House,” she said. A few RNC employees wiped away tears. They were surely aware that their own days were numbered in this consolidating family business.Sure enough, 60 RNC staffers would quickly be axed by the incoming regime, executed by the new RNC co-chairs, Michael Whatley and—the real new boss—Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, who had been handpicked by the holy father (in-law) himself.The message was clear: “That Republican Party, frankly, no longer exists,” Donald Trump Jr. gloated on Newsmax the day of the RNC staff purges. “The moves that happened today—that’s the final blow. People have to understand that … the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party.”Lara Trump rose from her seat, slim, cocksure, and angular in the classic style of the family wives. Her father-in-law called Lara “his most valuable asset,” the Maryland committeeman David Bossie would say in his speech seconding her. She was fully fluent in the family language: victimhood. How unfair it all is. All of the witch hunts. “The scales are always tipped against him,” the new co-chair would later tell Sean Hannity on Fox News. “It’s rigged so heavily.”“Since the day my father-in-law came down the golden escalator—everyone remembers that famous day—this has never just been about each of us as individuals,” she said in her acceptance speech in Houston. “It is about us as a family, and it’s been about our country.”“This isn’t about just right versus left, Republican versus Democrat,” she said. “It’s about good versus evil.”These were big stakes indeed. Heads nodded in every row as Lara gazed upon the crowd, and her voice softened in reverence.“I’d be remiss,” she said, “if I didn’t thank President Donald J. Trump.”She would never be remiss. KEVIN MCCARTHY2016: Likens Trump to Benito Mussolini.January 6, 2021:Trump to McCarthy: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”McCarthy: “More upset? They’re trying to fucking kill me!”2024: When asked if the Republicans should nominate a convicted felon, he says: “The answer is 100 percent yes.”(Alex Wong / Getty) After Lara’s speech, I made a quick sweep of the place in search of McDaniel, but she had disappeared, possibly never to be seen again.As I left the Hilton, I ran into Ron Kaufman, a Republican committeeman from Massachusetts. I was surprised to find that Kaufman, a vestige of the pre-Trump party—he served in George H. W. Bush’s administration—was still involved with the RNC. As it would turn out, he would not be there much longer: Kaufman was voted off by the MAGA-fied committee a month later.He had to have seen this coming. Kaufman remained close to Mitt Romney and, unlike McDaniel, did nothing to hide this association. After Houston, Kaufman told me, he was heading down to Florida to celebrate Romney’s 77th birthday, not far—geographically, anyway—from Mar-a-Lago, where Trump would be receiving a dear friend of his own the same weekend: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, an authoritarian whom Trump hailed as the best leader in the world.Kaufman told me he was fine with Trump, explaining to me in the common parlance of a practiced Trump apologist that “not everybody likes his style.”“Don’t you have any ambivalence at all about Trump?” I asked.“I have ambivalence about my first wife,” Kaufman replied.This was not an answer I was expecting.“But you probably wouldn’t vote for her as president, either,” I said. “Or would you?”I include this exchange because it typifies how some longtime Republican officials—clearly uneasy about Trump—can become comically evasive whenever asked about him. I interviewed several who veered straight into spheroid equivocation.Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whom Trump famously tried to strong-arm to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, seemed especially anxious when I had breakfast with him in Atlanta in May. “Why are you so afraid of saying what you really feel about Trump?” I asked.“Because no one gives me the platform to do that,” he replied.“But I just did,” I said.“That’s not the platform,” Raffensperger said, looking down at the phone on which I was recording our discussion.(Raffensperger’s communications aide then jumped in, effectively shutting down whatever platform this was or wasn’t.)The night before, which happened to be primary night in Georgia, I’d attended an election watch party hosted by Mike Dugan, a former Republican majority leader in the state senate who was running for an open congressional seat near the Alabama border.“Does anything about Trump give you pause?” I’d asked him.“Oh yeah, I don’t want to hang out with him,” Dugan had told me, adding that he likes many of Trump’s policies.But what about all of the outrage, distraction, and controversy Trump tends to generate?“He’s not asking me to come play golf with him,” Dugan had explained to me.“What if he did ask?”“I’m not a golfer.” VIVEK RAMASWAMY2021: Calls Trump “a sore loser” and his election denialism “abhorrent.” Describes January 6 as “a dark day for democracy.”2023: Calls January 6 “an inside job.”2024: “Donald Trump was the greatest president of the 21st century.”(Victor J. Blue / Bloomberg / Getty) ELISE STEFANIK2015: “I think he has been insulting to women.”2016 [Speaking of some of Trump’s policies]: “I don’t think that’s who we are. That’s not according to our constitutional principles.”2024: “I’d be honored to serve in a future Trump administration.”(Tom Williams / Getty) Unluckily for Dugan, his main Republican rival for the congressional seat, Brian Jack, used to work for Trump in the White House. Back in March, Trump had traveled to Rome, Georgia, for a rally in which he would praise Jack as “a fighter” and “a MAGA man.”Jack seemed like a savvy operative with good political instincts (proof: he did not respond to my texts). “I am both humbled and honored to earn your endorsement,” he said at the rally for the man he called “the greatest president and political athlete of all time.” As someone who has hung around Trump a lot, Jack knew enough to focus on the boss’s main erogenous zone: his golf game. Trump appears to reserve special appreciation for those attendants who are willing to exult in his alleged physical prowess—right out of the authoritarian playbook of the bare-chested and robust Vladimir Putin on horseback.“I’m not sure if I should say this,” Jack said faux-sheepishly, “but, just a few weeks ago, President Trump put to shame two professional golfers.” He then revealed that Trump had shot a 70 on 18 holes. This sounded impressive, I thought, though not as impressive as the 11 holes in one that the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il shot in the first golf game he ever played (source: North Korean state media, 1994).Although Jack was not yet well known in this heavily Republican district, he was “Trump-endorsed”—all the yard signs said so—which is akin to a golden ticket in today’s GOP. (Jack wound up winning the primary by a large margin.) The path always starts with a beeline to Trump’s rump. As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis observed in January: “You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring, he’ll say you’re wonderful.”In 2022, J. D. Vance proved himself a master. Although the Senate candidate from Ohio had previously dismissed Trump as “noxious,” “reprehensible,” and “cultural heroin,” among other things, he worked to convince Trump that he was reformed. Trump may or may not have believed him, but he very much relished the grovel of it.“J.D. is kissing my ass. He wants my support so bad!” Trump bragged at a campaign stop with Vance in Youngstown in 2022. He also claimed that Vance had fallen “in love” with him. If anything, this is the fun part for Trump: showing off that he has snapped up another politician like a distressed condo asset. He had made another Republican candidate—a rich Ivy League ex-Marine, no less—self-emasculate on his behalf.They all wore red ties, or most of them did. Fat and long, the signature Trumpian garments hung just below their belts. It was not clear whether Trump himself cared (he probably did; such an honor!), but dressing in the boss’s full uniform—white shirt, navy suit, and the signature neckwear—was an added curtsy. If Trump had a mustache, his acolytes would all grow and groom one just like his—as Baath Party loyalists did for Saddam Hussein.They made their pilgrimage to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where Trump spent a good part of May facing 34 criminal counts stemming from his ill-fated attempt to hide a $130,000 payment to his alleged porno paramour. The acolytes flanked their victim/defendant on the 15th floor as he sat with his arms crossed, jacket open, and eyes closed through prolonged stretches. “I do have a lot of surrogates, and they are speaking very beautifully,” Trump bragged during one of his news conferences. Ben Hickey My visit to 100 Centre Street coincided with the arrival of a large retinue of Trump’s defenders: 11 Republican House members made the trip that Thursday. They would take turns decrying (“very beautifully”) the “political persecution” that was taking place and the travesty of how Biden had “weaponized” the courts against the “greatest president in history.” I waited for the House members at a park across the street from the courthouse, along with a daily clot of reporters and camerapeople, clusters of pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators, and some bemused tourists, most of them from other countries, who had no idea what they’d stumbled upon.“Standing back and standing by, Mr. President,” said Representative Matt Gaetz, the poofy-haired provocateur from Florida who led that day’s brownnoser brigade. Gaetz’s words, which appeared on X, intentionally echoed Trump’s from the 2020 debate where he’d been asked to condemn neofascist groups who had been disrupting some of that summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by” is how Trump responded to the debate question, less a call for restraint than a call to action. (“A dog whistle through a bullhorn” is how Kamala Harris described it at the time.)Each of the Trump toadies in attendance outside the courthouse said their piece about the towering injustice that was occurring inside. Trump is “in good spirits,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida reported, while Gaetz complained that their hero was facing “the Mr. Potato Head doll of crimes,” which is not technically a legal classification, by the way.A group of New York hecklers greeted the traveling-circus caucus with Bronx cheers. One man stood behind the field-trippers holding a Bootlickers sign.“Lies, lies,” the hecklers cried out.“Get the fuck out of New York!”“Go to fucking hell!”“Matt Gaetz is a pedophile!”Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado started to speak but was interrupted by chants of “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” which, for the uninitiated, referred to an incident at a Denver theater in September 2023 when Boebert was evicted from the musical comedy for performing a series of infractions in her seat: vaping, giggling, and fondling her date below the belt.Straining to be heard over the hecklers, Boebert vowed that neither Trump nor his supporters would be gagged. “President Trump is not going anywhere … And we are not going anywhere, either.”A few minutes later, they were all gone.Boebert saved her best work for that night back at the Capitol, where the House Oversight Committee held a session to debate contempt charges against Attorney General Merrick Garland. (Originally scheduled for that morning, it had been postponed because so many members were in New York.) Boebert took the opportunity to boast on Trump’s behalf about one of his favorite topics: his supreme intelligence—as evidenced by the fact that, as Trump loves to mention, he allegedly once “aced” some cognitive test.But here’s what Boebert actually said: “President Trump, when he was in office, underwent testing for his cognitive dissonance.”I’ve noticed that for whatever reason, Trump is a magnet for these kinds of mangled phrases, misstatements, and malapropisms. This might be because those who speak excitedly about Trump, including Trump himself, tend to talk fast and off-the-cuff and perhaps have less capacity than most for shame and embarrassment (and grammar). They can be desperate to please and maybe get careless or lapse into Freudian candor. “We’ve been waging an all-out war on American democracy,” Trump announced in Iowa this past December. TOM COTTON2021: “It’s past time for the president to accept the results of the election, quit misleading the American people, and repudiate mob violence.”2024: “When Donald Trump was president, America was safe, strong, and prosperous.”(Drew Angerer / Getty) MIKE JOHNSON2015: “The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House … He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief … I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be president.”2023: “I’m all in for President Trump.”(Tierney L. Cross / Bloomberg / Getty) Boebert’s “cognitive dissonance” claim made me think of the early days of COVID, in 2020, when Trump tried to convince everyone that the pandemic would soon disappear. Why? Because you’ll develop “a herd mentality,” Trump explained at a town hall in Pennsylvania. He presumably meant “herd immunity,” but this felt like an apt malapropism, if there is such a thing.Trump’s movement had in fact drawn his followers together as a self-reinforcing herd. They were joined in contempt for a unified enemies list—defined loosely as liberal elites. They also shared the buoyant faith that supporting Trump would be a panacea. “Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore,” Trump reassured a gathering of Christian conservatives this past July.“What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain,” as Vance wrote in this magazine in 2016. He was a fierce critic of Trump before he became a Republican Senate candidate who saw an obvious path to the front of the herd.Vance was one of several vice-presidential prospects who trekked to New York to audition to be Trump’s next Mike Pence. He donned the red tie and nailed his umbrage marks. Vivek Ramaswamy, the super-thirsty former GOP-primary candidate, performed his own star turn at the courthouse, but with one notable hiccup. “Let’s pray for our country being stronger on the other side of this disgusting sham politician,” Ramaswamy said. He tried to correct himself—“prosecution”—but it was too late. The word had escaped. The moment went viral.Cognitive dissonance can be exhausting, and there’s a lot of that going around the herd these days. I kept thinking about this as I ambled through the Republican convention. It was such an upbeat and cheerful affair, not characteristic at all of these gatherings since Trump took over the franchise and made it a grievance-filled and even menacing place. Trump was solidly up in the polls. He’d just survived an assassination attempt, which lent a charmed-life quality to the proceedings.Several delegates I spoke with said the near miss proved that Trump either had been touched by God or possessed a superhuman ability to withstand danger. Biden, meanwhile, seemed old and tired, and his campaign appeared terminal (and in fact it was).Yet beneath the Republicans’ triumphalist excitement in Milwaukee, I sensed an undercurrent of disbelief. They were projecting confidence, yes, but there was a tight, gritted-teeth quality to this, of a once-serious party that had now been subdued, disoriented, and denuded of whatever their convictions once were. The final scene of The Graduate came to mind: Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross were out of breath after catching the bus. They had gotten what they thought they wanted. But what had they really just done—again? J. D. VANCE2016–17: Trump is “cultural heroin” … “Never liked him” … “I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy” … “Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office” … “a moral disaster” … “America’s Hitler.”2024: Named Donald Trump’s running mate.(Anna Moneymaker / Getty) Republicans had expressed these doubts before, and not so long ago, before they all capitulated. I watched a lot of Trump’s biggest former skeptics as they peacocked their way through the arena: Rubio, Cruz, Graham, Vance, DeSantis, Burgum, Ramaswamy, Elise Stefanik, and the rest. They had made their calculations, wore their practiced faces of satisfaction, and had somehow found a way to live with the learned helplessness that Trump had reduced them to. But others who had served Trump had made different judgments. I kept recalling the words of retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, who had been Trump’s first secretary of defense. Mattis, who was of course nowhere near this convention, had issued a statement on the night of January 6, 2021, blasting Trump as well as those who enabled him as “pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.” In other words: They all knew better.That was the nagging dissonance of this spectacle: the gap between what the GOP traditionally believed and what it now allows itself to abide. The party that allegedly reveres the Constitution is going all in on someone who has called for its termination. A party that cherishes freedom is willing to cede authority to a candidate who says he would be a dictator on his first day in office. A party that supposedly venerates law and order is re-upping with an actual felon. A party whose rank and file overwhelmingly wants Russia to defeat Ukraine believes that Biden stole the 2020 election, and that Trump’s legal shambles are entirely a Democratic plot. This is now a party whose standard-bearer has not been endorsed by any former Republican president or nominee, or even his own vice president, who barely escaped death by hanging the last time. And to what end, any of it?Or maybe the dissonance doesn’t matter. Trump can do as he pleased, as he predicted. “Well, I think we’ve had very weak people,” he said in 2015. “I look at some of the people that are running, and I think they’re not strong people.” I remember hearing that as bombast at the time, the kind of casual dismissals Trump tosses around. In retrospect, though, Trump was prospecting, sizing up the Republican “leaders” he would be competing against. If nothing else, Trump has a keen eye for finding soft targets: pushovers he can bully, rules he can flout, entire political parties he can raze and remake in his image. He would roll over them.This article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump.”

When the critic Janet Malcolm set aside a biography of Sylvia Plath and began reading a memoir about the author instead, she felt as if she “had been freed from prison.” The writing in the biography, Bitter Fame, by Anne Stevenson, had been “by far the most intelligent” of the published Plath biographies at the time, but the conventions of the form, its “hushed cautiousness, the solemn weighing of ‘evidence,’” could stifle even the most effervescent talent. Stevenson’s pursuit of objectivity had required a sacrifice of style and of feeling.It was 1994 when Malcolm published those words in The Silent Woman, her book-length investigation of Plath’s reputation, her work, and the people who tried to write about her. Since then, the number of biographical projects on Plath has more than doubled. Her short life and death by suicide provoke an unrelenting fascination. So does her writing, which trembles with feminine rage and aliveness. Some argue that Plath has been eulogized enough, but who’s to say when a subject has been exhausted? More than 30 biographies of Sigmund Freud exist; 50-plus on Winston Churchill. As the scholar Emily Van Duyne, the author of a new biography on Plath, wrote in 2020, “No one ever asks when we will be ‘done’ with the Beatles.”A new biography of Audre Lorde by the poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs is only the second full-length text treatment of the author, who was born in 1934, 16 months after Plath, in Harlem. Taking its title from a passage in a draft of Lorde’s 1984 essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” Gumbs’s layered and original Survival Is a Promise deeply engages with Lorde’s poetry and prose. It also takes a full accounting of her life, including aspects that another biographer might consider ephemeral. Major figures and events are held up for analysis alongside false starts, mistakes, words stricken from typewritten manuscripts. Gumbs finds meaning in the locks of shorn hair she discovers in Lorde’s archive and in the fauna of St. Croix, where the author drew her final breaths. Foregrounding the often-difficult conditions that shaped her, Gumbs’s book revels in Lorde’s lush multiplicity, moving through the ebbs and flows of her life with both precision and lyricism and expanding the limits of what a biography can be and hold and feel like.Lorde was a prolific creator. In her 58 years, she wrote enough poetry to fill a dozen collections, many essays and speeches, and a memoir she called a biomythography; she also co-founded the historic feminist press Kitchen Table to promote women writers of color. She held a central belief in the liberatory possibility of language, which had been instilled in her early on by her Bajan book-collecting father and a Black librarian at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. (That branch is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.)[Read: The brilliance in James Baldwin’s letters]Lorde was an outcast in her family (because she was the darker-skinned daughter of a woman who sometimes passed for white) and at her elite high school (because she was Black). Perhaps to soothe these cuts to her soul, she pursued connections with chosen family, and equipped herself with knowledge of ancestors, spirits, nature, and the stars. Other poets were a guiding force. At Hunter College High School, Lorde worked on the literary magazine alongside the future Beat poet Diane di Prima. With a group of other outcast girls, the two held séances on the floor of a schoolroom, where they conjured the ghosts of dead Romantics such as Lord Byron and John Keats and called themselves “the Branded.” “The poetic lineage Lorde and the Branded claimed was compelling and visionary and bleak,” Gumbs writes. “They identified with the fallen.”Gumbs calls Survival a “cosmic biography” because it accounts for the ways in which “the dynamic of the planet and the universe are never separate from the life of any being.” Natural wonders were deeply intertwined with Lorde’s life: The biographer devotes lyrical passages to eclipses, volcanoes, and especially hurricanes. In 1989, Lorde survived Hugo in St. Croix, a U.S. territory, and documented the government's militarized response. Her father had been an infant in 1898 when the Windward Islands hurricane killed more than 300 people in the eastern Caribbean. It displaced some 45,000 in Barbados alone, and destroyed its lucrative sugarcane crop, then the country’s chief export. Gumbs speculates that his eventual migration to Panama and then Grenada, where he met the woman who would become Lorde’s mother, could be traced to the storm’s many upheavals.This episode also illustrates Gumbs’s remarkable approach to time. “Read this book in any order you want,” she instructs. Rather than a typical biography “linearly dragging you from a cradle to a grave,” Survival Is a Promise is constructed out of 58 short, lyrical, often essayistic chapters, one for each year of Lorde’s life, that can also be read “like a collection of poems.”The book begins with what would be a conventional ending. More than 20 years after her subject’s death, Gumbs sits with a trove of Lorde’s own hurricane-worn copies of her books. The next chapter evokes the dedication ceremony of the Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center at Hunter College in 1985. (At this point, Lorde knew that her cancer, first diagnosed in 1977, had returned, and she and her community treated this event as something of a first funeral.) Only then do we propel backwards, to the circumstances of Lorde’s birth, her childhood, her teenage years, and beyond. Like a hurricane, the book rapidly covers enormous ground while also moving in multiple directions at once. The effect is associative and discursive.Ultimately, Gumbs seems to want her undulating biography to feel like truth. Because Lorde’s words remain in the zeitgeist, her afterlife is detailed with just as much care. In the years since the publication of Alexis De Veaux’s Warrior Poet, the first full-length biography of Lorde, popular movements for social justice have taken excerpts from the poet’s essays and speeches. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” the title of a 1979 talk on feminist organizing, became a slogan for a host of causes, including reimagining the role of the police. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence” has been used in social-media captions trumpeting spa days and vacations. Lorde wrote that sentence in the context of her struggle with breast cancer, which she’d learned had metastasized to her liver three years before.Gumbs implores readers to dig beneath the shallow appropriations. “We need her survival poetics beyond the iconic version of her that has become useful for diversity-center walls and grant applications,” she writes. “We need the center of her life.” The book returns flesh to Lorde’s memory, painstakingly describing her lost school friends; her first crush; the honeybees she kept with her partner, Gloria Joseph; and her garden; it grounds her legacy in the stuff of her life.A comprehensive biography accounts for a subject’s shortcomings, and Gumbs does not discuss Lorde’s in any depth. But she does acknowledge conflict. In a searching, tender timbre, she traces the rift between Lorde and the poet June Jordan. Also born in Harlem in the 1930s, Jordan met Lorde when they were instructors for the SEEK program at the City University of New York, which helped students from under-resourced backgrounds prepare for college. Their relationship became strained when Jordan refused to identify as a lesbian. Lorde believed that visibility could combat queer people’s marginalization; Jordan believed identity politics could devolve, creating community for some while excluding others. Later, Jordan became furious when her and Lorde’s mutual friend, the poet Adrienne Rich, publicly avowed her Zionism following Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. When Jordan wrote an open letter for the feminist newspaper WomaNews decrying Rich’s stance, a group of other feminists, including Lorde, signed a letter criticizing Jordan, whose letter was never published. Though the two continued to teach each other’s work, there is no record of a resolution.[Read: The many lives of Adrienne Rich]Gumbs lets her own musings fill in the blanks, imagining that the women still held each other in fondness, inquiring after each other through friends and colleagues. “There is no documentation, but that doesn’t mean I can’t imagine it,” she writes. This is just one of several unconventional choices that seem to address Janet Malcolm’s quibbles with biography. “The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination,” Malcolm wrote.Gumbs has reported both the reality of her own imagination and the facts according to the available record. The result is a prismatic work of art that invites more questions. I hope it may also bring about more inventive considerations of other artists. For many of Lorde’s generation of esteemed sister-poets, major biographies have yet to be published. June Jordan is one of them. The still-living poet Sonia Sanchez is another; she was the last speaker at the podium of Lorde’s 1993 memorial at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.

Donald Trump’s far-right worldview has a lot of critics, many of them Republicans, who argue that Ronald Reagan would “roll over” or “turn over” in his grave if he could see what is happening to his old party. The Trump-dominated, populist-nationalist GOP is certainly very different from the conservative party that Reagan led in the 1980s, and Trump is a very different figure, in both outlook and personality, from Reagan. But it’s also true that, however much Trump has changed the Republican Party since 2016 (and the changes have been enormous), the roots of Trumpism can be traced back to Reagan—and, before him, to Barry Goldwater and even earlier figures on the American right. Uncomfortable as it is for many Reagan fans to admit, the 40th president inadvertently prepared the ground for the 45th in multiple ways. These similarities are a reminder that Trump did not emerge from nowhere, and that ridding the Republican Party of his influence won’t be easy. The differences between Trump and Reagan are, to be sure, substantial. Trump criticized Reagan’s policies in the ’80s. He took out newspaper advertisements in 1987 to argue that “Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States” and that “the world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”Reagan was pro-immigration and pro–free trade, rejecting the nativism and protectionism that have been Trump’s hallmarks. He launched his 1980 campaign with a speech that included a proposal for a “North American Accord” to allow “peoples and commerce” to “flow more freely” across the borders between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. This idea eventually blossomed into the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump called the “worst deal ever.” As president, Reagan signed the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which legalized millions of undocumented immigrants—exactly the kind of “amnesty” provision that Trump and his followers denounce today.Although Reagan, like Trump, did not see combat, he, unlike Trump, venerated U.S. troops and staunchly supported U.S. alliances such as NATO.Reagan would never have denounced veterans as “suckers” and “losers,” denigrated Medal of Honor recipients, or told the Russians that they can do “whatever the hell they want” to U.S. allies who don’t pay more for their defense.[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump says Americans who died in war are ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’]So, too, is it inconceivable that Reagan would have raised any concerns about supporting Ukraine. As president, Reagan backed anti-Communist insurgents from Afghanistan to Nicaragua.The stylistic differences between Reagan and Trump may be even more notable than the policy differences. Trump is a foul-mouthed vulgarian who maligns his critics in harsh terms. Reagan, by contrast, was a consummate gentleman who seldom had a harsh word for anyone. A product of the early-20th-century, small-town Midwest, Reagan even in the privacy of his own diary never spelled out hell and damn (instead writing “h---l” and “d---n”). Reagan revered America as a “shining city on a hill” and ran for reelection in 1984 claiming it was “Morning in America.” Reagan would never say, as Trump just did, that “the American dream is dead” and that “our country is doing really badly.” Reagan inspired hope, whereas Trump spreads fear.Despite their many differences, however, the only two presidents who have hosted a nationally televised show before taking office (General Electric Theater for Reagan, The Apprentice for Trump) also share some significant similarities. Reagan was a populist who reviled the government he led, even if he did not call it the “deep state,” and belittled expertise. He often quipped, “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” Reagan’s attacks on the federal government were wittier and tamer than Trump’s, but they intensified the anti-government mood that Trump has exploited in recent years. Reagan’s policies, tilted toward the wealthy, exacerbated income inequality, thus also contributing to the populist backlash that Trump now harnesses.More similarities: Reagan was proud of his dealmaking skills (learned as a union negotiator, not a real-estate mogul), and he promised in his 1980 campaign to “make America great again.” He displayed an often-shocking ignorance of public policy, even if he knew far more, and read far more, than Trump. He often made false statements, even if he uttered fewer than Trump has, and he had a cavalier attitude toward fact-checking. Asked in 1965 by a graduate student about his oft-repeated and false claim that “no nation in history has ever survived a tax burden of one-third of our national income,” Reagan breezily replied, “I’m sorry … I just plain don’t have that source any longer,” and continued repeating it in his speeches. Reagan arguably inured Republicans to Trump’s far more pervasive falsehoods.So, too, did Reagan’s campaign rhetoric sometimes contain the extremism espoused today by Trump. Early in his political career, Reagan regularly accused Democrats of plotting to turn America into a socialist and even communist country with their welfare programs, just as Trump later did. In his famous 1964 “Time for Choosing” speech, Reagan accused Democrats of “taking the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.” Reagan later moderated his rhetoric; Trump never has. Perhaps the most disturbing Trump-Reagan parallels concern public health and race relations. Reagan mishandled the AIDS epidemic, just as Trump mishandled COVID-19, resulting in needless loss of life. Reagan did not make a speech on AIDS until 1987, six years after the first cases were reported, and did next to nothing to mobilize a federal response even as nearly 50,000 Americans died of the disease while he was in office.[David Frum: Is America still the ‘shining city on a hill’?]Although Reagan always insisted, much like Trump, that “I just am incapable of prejudice,” he regularly appealed to white-backlash voters—albeit less crudely than Trump. Reagan opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which he called “purely an emotional bill based on political expediency,” and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which he described as “humiliating to the South.” He later used coded appeals to white voters, condemning “welfare queens,” demanding “law and order,” and, in 1980, endorsing “states’ rights” in Mississippi near the site where three civil-rights workers had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. As president, Reagan tried to water down civil-rights laws and opposed tough sanctions on South Africa.We should not exaggerate the similarities between Reagan and Trump. If Reagan were alive today, he undoubtedly would be criticized by Trump supporters as a RINO (“Republican in name only”). But Reagan, like other Republican politicians of earlier eras, helped set the GOP—and the country—on the path that led it to embrace Trump. The question for the Republican Party now is: What comes next? Will the party continue moving ever further to the right, toward a Viktor Orbán–style authoritarian movement that would presumably have Reagan (an avid believer in democracy) doing more spinning in his grave? Or will it revert to being a more center-right party in the Reagan mold? In the 1980s, “Reaganism” represented a right turn for the GOP. Today it would represent a left turn—a restoration of a more moderate, if still conservative, outlook. That may still happen. But only if Trump loses decisively in November—and even then, it won’t be easy.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is staff writer Michael Powell, who has written about the seriousness of Donald Trump’s incident at Arlington National Cemetery, the unreality of Columbia University’s “liberated zone,” and how everything went wrong for New York City Mayor Eric Adams.Michael is a loyal Knicks fan whose love for basketball helped inspire the creation of Rez Ball, an upcoming Netflix film that’s based on his book. He also appreciates the lyrical genius of Bob Dylan, Ursula K. Le Guin’s poetic musings, and Vermeer’s delicate work.First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: Inside the dangerous, secretive world of extreme fishing The Democrat who’s not that worried about Trump The friendship paradox The Culture Survey: Michael PowellThe upcoming culture event I’m most looking forward to: The Toronto International Film Festival, where I will attend the premiere of Rez Ball, a sports-drama movie directed by the Navajo filmmaker Sydney Freeland. The film, about a high-school basketball team from the Navajo Nation vying to compete in the state championships, was co-produced by LeBron James and inspired by my book Canyon Dreams; it will debut on Netflix on September 27 and features an all-Native main cast.A good recommendation I recently received: To read back-to-back Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, and James, a novel by Percival Everett that reimagines Huck Finn’s story from the perspective of his friend Jim, an escaped slave. The novels are both deep and excellent. [Related: A bloody retelling of Huckleberry Finn]My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Following Wikipedia entries deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. I start with some current controversy and end up reading about Imperial Roman trading ports on the southeast shore of India. Secondly, and most consistently, I keep up with the Knicks and the Mets on any platform available.A painting or other piece of visual art that I cherish: Anything by the delicate, transcendent Johannes Vermeer, and the Taj Mahal, the sight of which never fails to bring me to tears. [Related: Vermeer’s revelavations]My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: The Brazilian movie City of God, directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, and The Godfather are my top blockbuster picks. For my art-film selection, Alfonso Cuarón’s film Roma, set in Mexico City, astounded me. [Related: The uncomfortable and profound authenticity of Roma]Actors I would watch in anything: Robert Duvall is such a nuanced, smart actor who never feels the need to dominate a scene. He lets it come to him. Robert De Niro is another brilliant actor who can be menacing or a leading man or a comic, which is rare—although I’m reminded of late that, yes, there really are some movies I would not watch even him in. Then there’s Meryl Streep, a star with the soul of a character actor. There is no role she could not inhabit.A musical artist who means a lot to me: Bob Dylan. He has endless artistry, expressive vocal phrasing, and oh, those lyrics …The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I have started my rewatch of Homicide: Life on the Street. The precursor to The Wire, the series was astonishing at the time for network television. So many great actors: Andre Braugher, Yaphet Kotto, Melissa Leo, Ned Beatty, Richard Belzer, and on and on. I’m interested to see if it holds up after three decades. [Related: The angriest man in television]The best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: For fiction, I recommend Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, and The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin, who is poetic and artful without being arty. As for nonfiction: The Science Delusion and A New Science of Life, both by Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist and philosopher who relentlessly challenges what we think we know.The last debate I had about culture: Should the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement prevent an Israeli dance troupe from performing in New York? Should protesters target an exhibition in Manhattan commemorating those killed by Hamas on October 7? I strongly argue for artistic and academic freedom—and I find it inane to pick out a flawed democracy in a world full of far more flawed nations and say that it alone should be cut off from global support. [Related: Cancel culture cuts both ways.]A museum show that I loved: The “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, had the great virtue of exposing me to the work of an artist I had seen only in passing. And the “Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle” exhibit at the nearby Guggenheim Museum was simply brilliant.Something I recently revisited: Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, his magisterial and occasionally controversial and revisionist history of American slavery.Online creators that I’m a fan of: I’ve come to truly admire many podcasts. To name just three of many: the eccentric, ecumenical, and inquiring DemystifySci, run by two wayward Columbia University–trained scientists; the incisive The Rest Is History, with the historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland, which ranges impossibly wide, with wit and humor; and The Glenn Show, featuring the congenitally contrarian Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University.My favorite stories I’ve read in The Atlantic recently: Caitlin Dickerson followed her beat, her passion, to the dangerous jungle in the Darién Gap and wrote a story not of adventure but of compassion and humanity. Mark Leibovich has a scalpel eye and humor with steeliness beneath, as seen in his recent articles on Joe Biden’s refusal to confront his own aging. Then there’s Stephanie McCrummen’s cover story on the displacement of the Maasai, Jennifer Senior on anything …A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to:“The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.”The Week Ahead The Killer’s Game, an action-comedy about an assassin who takes out a hit on himself but must fight off the hit men when they target his ex-girlfriend (in theaters Friday) Season 4 of Emily in Paris, a romantic-comedy series about an American woman who lives in Paris and must navigate work, friends, and a complicated love life (part two premieres Thursday on Netflix) Tell Me Everything, a novel by the Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout about a group of townspeople who come together after a woman is murdered (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by Rose Wong How Snacks Took Over American LifeBy Ellen Cushing There was a time, if you can believe it, when a respectable person could not have a little treat whenever she wanted. This time was, roughly, from the dawn of the republic to the middle of the 1980s. The American workday, menu, and social clock were oriented around meals, and eating between them was discouraged: If you were a child, snacking gave you cavities and spoiled your appetite; if you were an adult, it was kind of unseemly. There were no elaborate treats after soccer practice, or snack trays on strollers, or yogurts in tubes … The phrases girl dinner and new flavor drop were totally nonsensical, instead of just a bit nonsensical. Libraries, classrooms, cubicles, and theaters were, generally, where you read, learned, worked, and saw La bohème—but definitely did not eat. Some 40 years later, we are not just eating between meals; we are abandoning them entirely. Read the full article.More in Culture The brash new sound of hedonism Slow Horses and the dark psychology of an unwinnable game What Tucker Carlson’s spin on World War II really says Seven books that demystify human behavior The allure of living a radically different life Kaos offers a sharp twist on a familiar story. Rachel Kushner’s surprising swerve Catch Up on The Atlantic The GOP’s pro-family delusion Anne Applebaum: The Democrats’ patriotic vanguard What awaits a Harris presidency Photo Album George Clooney poses with photographers as he attends the Wolfs red carpet during the Venice International Film Festival. (Pascal Le Segretain / Getty) Check out these photos of the week, which show George Clooney at the Venice International Film Festival, the aftermath of a Russian bombing in Ukraine, Paralympians competing for gold, and more.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

I saw this guy tonight in Adam’s Point, by the lake—the sun was getting low, so I’d taken a break from grading—this guy in one of the green Carhartt jackets, smoking by the water. The light was really orange and in his face,and when he turned my way for a second, I don’t know, I just needed tocheck in on you. Is the ginger coming in okay, or did you have to dig it out?I was telling Gabby about your backyard; it’s really something. Two or three times this year I walked through the botanical garden and thought to send you a photo of the bunny orchid; it’s purple and white and blue and flowers best in June, near the solstice. Sorry to hear about Luna; she was a really sweet cat. One of the last times I hung out with Matty we packed lips in his apartment and talked a lot about Dad. I know your relationship was a little different, so I don’t wanna make things weird, but he told me how Dad slapped him around this one time as a kid. Matty’s paintball gun discharged in the house and broke a pane of glass. I guess Dad took him out to eat, after, that steakhouse off Palumbo, and let him drink a beer with his burger. He was telling me this and spitting into an empty Dasani bottle. His jacket wasn’t green and it wasn’t a Carhartt but it was that same style, impenetrable knit with the hood. I just stood there by the lake looking at the guy for a second too long probably, and he kind of got weirded out. He mean-mugged and shrugged at me. The fuck are you looking at? I turned home early, and I had to take the long way since the gardens close at sundown. I’m back home now, watching the sky above the city get all purple and dark, a little white where the stars come in. Now that Gabby’s moved in I’m never really alone, but she’s out tonight, drinking mezcal on Grand with a friend. The last thing Matty said before I left his apartment—he’d screwed the blue cap on his Dasani bottle and walked me to the door—was that I should get my brake lines checked. I guess he’d heard something when I pulled in. Now whenever I hear that whining sound when a car pulls up to the stop sign by our building, I think of him and that dingy apartment. I remember how big he seemed inside that jacket when I clapped him once on the shoulder and stepped out through the open screen door. He was holding it for me.