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Daniel Kahneman Wanted You to Realize How Wrong You Are
I first met Daniel Kahneman about 25 years ago. I’d applied to graduate school in neuroscience at Princeton University, where he was on the faculty, and I was sitting in his office for an interview. Kahneman, who died today at the age of 90, must not have thought too highly of the occasion. “Conducting an interview is likely to diminish the accuracy of a selection procedure,” he’d later note in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. That had been the first finding in his long career as a psychologist: As a young recruit in the Israel Defense Forces, he’d assessed and overhauled the pointless 15-to-20-minute chats that were being used for sorting soldiers into different units. And yet there he and I were, sitting down for a 15-to-20-minute chat of our own.I remember he was sweet, smart, and very strange. I knew him as a founder of behavioral economics, and I had a bare familiarity with the work on cognitive biases and judgment heuristics for which he was soon to win a Nobel Prize. I did not know that he’d lately switched the focus of his research to the science of well-being and how to measure it objectively. When I said during the interview that I’d been working in a brain-imaging lab, he began to talk about a plan he had to measure people’s level of delight directly from their brain. If neural happiness could be assessed, he said, then it could be maximized. I had little expertise—I’d only been a lab assistant—but the notion seemed far-fetched: You can’t just sum up a person’s happiness by counting voxels on a brain scan. I was chatting with a genius, yet somehow on this point he seemed … misguided?I still believe that he was wrong, on this and many other things. He believed so, too. Daniel Kahneman was the world’s greatest scholar of how people get things wrong. And he was a great observer of his own mistakes. He declared his wrongness many times, on matters large and small, in public and in private. He was wrong, he said, about the work that had won the Nobel Prize. He wallowed in the state of having been mistaken; it became a topic for his lectures, a pedagogical ideal. Science has its vaunted self-corrective impulse, but even so, few working scientists—and fewer still of those who gain significant renown—will ever really cop to their mistakes. Kahneman never stopped admitting fault. He did it almost to a fault.Whether this instinct to self-debunk was a product of his intellectual humility, the politesse one learns from growing up in Paris, or some compulsion born of melancholia, I’m not qualified to say. What, exactly, was going on inside his brilliant mind is a matter for his friends, family, and biographers. Seen from the outside, though, his habit of reversal was an extraordinary gift. Kahneman’s careful, doubting mode of doing science was heroic. He got everything wrong, and yet somehow he was always right.In 2011, he compiled his life’s work to that point into Thinking, Fast and Slow. Truly, the book is as strange as he was. While it might be found in airport bookstores next to business how-to and science-based self-help guides, its genre is unique. Across its 400-plus pages Kahleman lays out an extravagant taxonomy of human biases, fallacies, heuristics, and neglects, in the hope of making us aware of our mistakes, so that we might call out the mistakes that other people make. That’s all we can aspire to, he repeatedly reminds us, because mere recognition of an error doesn’t typically make it go away. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available, and cognitive illusions are generally more difficult to recognize than perceptual illusions,” he writes in the book’s conclusion. “The voice of reason may be much fainter than the loud and clear voice of an erroneous intuition.” That’s the struggle: We may not hear that voice, but we must attempt to listen.Kahneman lived with one ear cocked; he made errors just the same. The book itself was a terrific struggle, as he said in interviews. He was miserable while writing it, and so plagued by doubts that he paid some colleagues to review the manuscript and then tell him, anonymously, whether he should throw it in the garbage to preserve his reputation. They said otherwise, and others deemed the finished book a masterpiece. Yet the timing of its publication turned out to be unfortunate. In its pages, Kahneman marveled at great length over the findings of a subfield of psychology known as social priming. But that work—not his own—quickly fell into disrepute, and a larger crisis over irreproducible results began to spread. Many of the studies that Kahneman had touted in his book—he called one an “instant classic” and said of others, “Disbelief is not an option”—turned out to be unsound. Their sample sizes were far too small, and their statistics could not be trusted. To say the book was riddled with scientific errors would not be entirely unfair.If anyone should have caught those errors, it was Kahneman. Forty years earlier, in the very first paper that he wrote with his close friend and colleague Amos Tversky, he had shown that even trained psychologists—even people like himself—are subject to a “consistent misperception of the world” that leads them to make poor judgments about sample sizes, and to draw the wrong conclusions from their data. In that sense, Kahneman had personally discovered and named the very cognitive bias that would eventually corrupt the academic literature that he cited in his book.In 2012, as the extent of that corruption became apparent, Kahneman intervened. While some of those whose work was now in question grew defensive, he put out an open letter calling for more scrutiny. In private email chains, he reportedly goaded colleagues to engage with critics and to participate in rigorous efforts to replicate their work. In the end, Kahneman admitted in a public forum that he’d been far too trusting of some suspect data. “I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm for the surprising and elegant findings that I cited, but I did not think it through,” he wrote. He acknowledged the “special irony” of his mistake.Kahneman once said that being wrong feels good, that it gives the pleasure of a sense of motion: “I used to think something and now I think something else.” He was always wrong, always learning, always going somewhere new. In the 2010s, he abandoned the work on happiness that we’d discussed during my grad-school interview, because he realized—to his surprise—that no one really wanted to be happy in the first place. People are more interested in being satisfied, which is something different. “I was very interested in maximizing experience, but this doesn’t seem to be what people want to do,” he told Tyler Cowen in an interview in 2018. “Happiness feels good in the moment. But it’s in the moment. What you’re left with are your memories. And that’s a very striking thing—that memories stay with you, and the reality of life is gone in an instant.”The memories remain.
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How Climate Change Is Making Allergy Season Worse
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.Rising temperatures are leading to what my colleague Yasmin Tayag has called an “allergy apocalypse.” I spoke with Yasmin, who covers science for The Atlantic, about our ever-expanding allergy season, the relationship between rising temperatures and pollen, and the extent to which pollen may rob us of the pleasures of summer.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Anshel Pfeffer: “Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s worst prime minister ever.” The one third-party candidate Biden is worried about Can you ever really escape your ex? More Than a Seasonal AnnoyanceLora Kelley: It’s barely spring, and it feels like people are already suffering from allergies on the East Coast. To what extent has allergy season been expanding in recent years—and is it still fair to call it a “season”?Yasmin Tayag: There is a lot of research showing that pollen seasons are beginning earlier compared with several decades ago. They’re also more intense, in that there’s more pollen in the air. This is happening largely as a result of warming temperatures across the country.For now, allergy season does have a start and end date—you can still call it a “season.” In general, tree pollen kicks off allergy season in early spring, then it’s caused by grasses in the spring and summer, and ragweed in the fall. But in some parts of the country, allergy season is thought to last even longer: Florida’s is almost year-round. In those cases, it’s not a matter of a season.Lora: Could you walk me through the relationship between rising temperatures and rises in pollen?Yasmin: On the whole, temperatures rising means we see more pollen for longer. When the temperatures are warmer earlier in the year, the trees start releasing and creating pollen earlier. An increased amount of carbon dioxide in the air is also thought to increase pollen production.Not all plants respond to temperature in the same way. Predicting where allergies will be really bad also has to do with the plant life in that region and whether those plants are sensitive to temperature.Lora: Why are some adults only recently starting to show allergy symptoms?Yasmin: There are some people who are genetically predisposed to allergies. They get symptoms as soon as the pollen is in the air. Some people have a much higher pollen threshold, meaning they can be exposed to pollen for longer or handle a higher level of pollen exposure before showing symptoms for the first time. But with a much longer and more intense season, more people are meeting that threshold.Your surrounding environment can also affect your allergies. If you live in a place that doesn’t have a ton of trees or is very cool, you might have fewer symptoms than someone with the same DNA living in a perpetually warm place.Allergies can be more than a seasonal annoyance. They can be devastating for people who have asthma, in particular, because they can trigger asthma attacks.Lora: Is there anything people can do to avoid this fate?Yasmin: Not much. You can manage your exposure, and, in general, people can manage their symptoms.As pollen levels go up year after year, people can get into the habit of checking the pollen count before they go outside. If it’s going to be an allergy day, take the necessary precautions to reduce your exposure. That can mean staying indoors as much as possible, or shutting your windows. In some instances, you might even want to change clothes when you enter the house so you don’t track pollen inside.There are other therapies that are sometimes effective, such as exposure therapies, where over time you build up the amount of pollen you encounter so your body gets used to it. As an allergy sufferer myself, I recommend traveling with allergy medication; maybe your symptoms will spike in the middle of the day. And wear waterproof mascara.Lora: How could higher pollen levels shift our relationship to nature and the outdoors?Yasmin: I think it means spending less time outside, which is terrible. And what I really feel sad about is having to close your windows in the summertime—being shut out from the summer breeze. We already spend so much of the year cooped up indoors, and to further isolate ourselves indoors because there’s so much pollen in the air feels like missing out on the best parts of the warmer seasons.Related: There is no stopping the allergy apocalypse. Climate change is making allergy season even worse. (From 2022) Today’s News Authorities announced last night that the six missing construction workers who were on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed are presumed dead. Former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, a longtime congressman who was the first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party, died from complications from a fall, according to a statement from his family. Yesterday, NBC News cut ties with Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of the Republican National Committee who previously disputed the 2020 election results, days after hiring her. Evening Read Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: CSA-Archive / Getty. A Bad GambleBy Jemele Hill This week, the pro baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani addressed the media for the first time since his name surfaced in an investigation of an alleged illegal gambling ring. He told reporters that the $4.5 million in wire transfers from his account had been sent without his knowledge by his friend and interpreter, and that he had “never bet on baseball or any other sports.” Opening Day is this week, and Major League Baseball can’t be happy about this cloud over its biggest star. But with gambling so deeply embedded in mainstream sports culture, and most sports leagues now in partnership with gambling operations, these kinds of scandals have become far more common. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Why Trump won’t stop suing the media and losing “Lunch at the Polo Club” Culture Break LaToya Ruby Frazier Examine. Spend time with the intimate, intergenerational portraits taken by the photographer and visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier.Read. Lisa Ko’s new novel, Memory Piece, details three women’s desire for freedom from capitalism, expectations, and the public eye, Lily Meyer writes.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.Explore all of our newsletters here.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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Benjamin Netanyahu Is Israel’s Worst Prime Minister Ever
One man’s ambition has undermined Israel’s security and consumed its politics.
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The Fantasy of a Truly Free Life
In Lisa Ko’s ambitious, messy novel, characters disappear, sell out, and opt out, all in search of a meaningful existence.
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Winners of the 2024 World Nature Photography Awards
The winning images and photographers of this year’s World Nature Photography Awards have just been announced. Contest organizers have once more shared some of the winning images, shown below, from their 14 categories. Captions were provided by the photographers and have been lightly edited for style and clarity.
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theatlantic.com
The Baltimore Bridge Collapse and America’s Fragility
The rapid collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore early this morning touched off a frantic search for survivors—and gave Americans a frightening reminder of the fragility of the many systems that allow us to go about our lives. The sun rose to reveal twisted metal atop the cargo ship Dali, a long underwater obstruction keeping ships from moving in and out of the Port of Baltimore, a major tear in the transportation network, and great uncertainty about how the catastrophe would ripple across the economy.When the errant Dali struck a support pillar, motorists were using the bridge, and work crews were fixing potholes on it. Local officials’ immediate focus is, as it should be, on rescuing any who might have survived and comforting the families still waiting for news. Authorities quickly and rightly put to rest speculation about terrorism. An investigation into what happened on the ship has been announced. In the meantime, the public and its elected leaders must improvise answers to a question that few people were contemplating last night: What would happen if a major piece of our infrastructure disappeared in the dark? How do we respond to what could be a lengthy disruption to a lifeline of the region’s maritime and transportation networks?Whether any bridge’s support structure could withstand a direct hit by a ship as large as the Dali is an open question at this hour. Maryland Governor Wes Moore said at a news conference this morning that the fallen Baltimore bridge was “fully up to code.”A lot of American infrastructure is in poor shape. What’s clear across the country is that, even as the U.S. tries to ramp up repairs to our old bridges, rails, roads, and dams, we are not keeping up with their decay—much less bringing them into the modern era, building more redundancy into our systems, or developing contingency plans for sudden disruptions. We need to spend more time and resources thinking about Plan B.In Baltimore, some immediate problems are already evident: The now-destroyed bridge was the preferred highway route for trucks carrying materials—such as bulk gas, explosives, and radioactive matter—that are too hazardous to pass through the city’s major surface roads or underwater tunnels under the harbor.The waters around the bridge are also disrupted. Baltimore’s port supports more than 15,000 jobs, by one estimate, and is a major importation point for cars and trucks, construction materials, and goods affecting many other industries. Ship hulls rip easily; figuring out which debris remains under water and removing threats to maritime navigation will take some time. Boats and ships will be restricted in their ability to travel near the wreckage, until at least the pieces of the bridge are excavated from the waters.[Read: More bridges will collapse]For many people, the most visible disruption will be to general vehicular traffic in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., areas and throughout the Northeast Corridor. Employers will have to relieve commuters from needing to travel; school children and others will experience delays if not cancellations; work and learn from home alternatives, at least for some time, will need to be instituted.None of this is easily practiced, but maybe it is time we begin to plan for it. The destruction of the Key Bridge appears to be a tragic accident, but it also offers a lesson.Those who plan complex systems often talk in terms of avoiding “single points of failure.” But the vulnerability of key pieces of infrastructure is all the more reason to plan in advance for how our transportation and economic systems can bounce back quickly from sudden setbacks.People in the emergency-management field throw the word resiliency around a lot. But resiliency isn’t something that a society just has; the word itself comes from a Latin verb meaning jump or leap, and it suggests movement and action—the consistent effort to prevent catastrophes whenever possible and limit their harms whenever necessary. The bridge collapse in Baltimore underscores the need for more of that kind of planning—not just bracing for impact and hoping for the best.
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theatlantic.com
A Drug Half as Good as Ozempic for One-30th the Price
“In my lifetime, I never dreamed that we would be talking about medicines that are providing hope for people like me,” Oprah Winfrey says at the top of her recent prime-time special on obesity. The program, called Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, is very clear on which medicines she means. At one point, Oprah stares into the camera and carefully pronounces their brand names for the audience: “Ozempic and Wegovy,” she says. “Mounjaro and Zepbound.” The class of drugs to which these four belong, called GLP-1 receptor agonists, is the reason for the special.For a brief and telling moment, though, Oprah’s story of the revolution falters. It happens midway through the program, when she’s just brought on two obesity doctors, W. Scott Butsch and Amanda Velazquez, to talk about the GLP-1 wonder drugs. “Were you all surprised in your practices when people started losing weight?” she asks. Butsch gets a little tongue-tied: “Yeah, I mean, I think we have—we’ve already been using other medications for the last 10, 20 years,” he says. “But these were just a little bit more effective.”Oprah is nonplussed. She didn’t know about these other drugs, before Ozempic, that were already helping people with obesity. “Where was I?” she cries. “Where was the announcement?” Velazquez milks the moment for a laugh—“We didn’t have TikTok; that was our problem,” she says—and the show moves on. Whatever the identity of these medicines that came before, these almost-as-effective ones, they will not receive another mention. The show proceeds as if they don’t exist.And yet: They do. Amid the hype around the GLP-1s, with their multibillion-dollar sales and corresponding reputation as a modern miracle of medicine, a sort of pharmaco-amnesia has taken hold across America. Patients and physicians alike have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew, that the agents of the “weight-loss revolution”—Ozempic and Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound—are just the latest medications for obesity. And that older drugs—among them Qsymia, Orlistat, and Contrave—are still available. Indeed, the best of these latter treatments might produce, on average, one-half the benefit you’d get from using GLP-1s in terms of weight loss, at less than one-30th the price.That result should not be ignored. Given the lack of widespread insurance coverage for the newer drugs, as well as marked lapses in supplies, many people have been left out of Oprah’s revolution. For last week’s special, she interviewed a mother and her daughter who say, to pursed-lipped expressions of concern, that they’d love to be on a drug like Wegovy or Zepbound, but “cannot access it financially.” Although the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has just announced that GLP-1 drugs for obesity may now be covered for seniors who also have cardiovascular disease, insurers have been pulling back. Next week, the North Carolina state workers’ health plan will cut off GLP-1 coverage for close to 25,000 people. Other, older drugs could help curb this crisis.[Read: Older Americans are about to lose a lot of weight]The newer drugs are much more potent. Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, produced an additional 12 percent loss of body weight, on average, compared with placebos in clinical trials; the equivalent result for the highest dose of tirzepatide, which is in Mounjaro and Zepbound, was 18 percent. Meanwhile, the most popular of the older drugs for treating obesity, an amphetamine derivative called phentermine, has been shown to produce, on average, a 3 or 4 percent loss of total body weight. When phentermine is prescribed along with another older drug called topiramate—they’re sold in combination as Qsymia—the effect is stronger: more than 9 percent additional weight loss as compared with placebo, according to one trial.The newer drugs have also been investigated in very larg e numbers of patients and been shown to measurably reduce obesity-related complications such as strokes, heart attacks, and death. “We have all this data showing that GLP-1 drugs are reducing cardiovascular events and having other benefits,” Eduardo Grunvald, the medical director of the weight-management program at UC San Diego Health, told me, “and we have no data on the other drugs on those issues.” (Like many prominent obesity doctors, including Butsch and Velazquez, Grunvald has received thousands of dollars in consulting fees and honoraria from the maker of Wegovy. He has also received payments from the company behind Contrave.) All else being equal, the GLP-1s are the better option.But all else is rarely equal. For one thing, the average weight-loss effects reported in the literature can’t tell you how each specific patient will respond to treatment. When people take Wegovy or Zepbound, more than half of them are strong responders, according to the published research, with weight loss that amounts to more than 15 percent. At the same time, roughly one in seven people gets no clear benefit at all. The older drugs also have a diversity of outcomes. Qsymia doesn’t seem to work for about one-third of those who take it, but another third finds Ozempesque success, losing at least 15 percent of body weight. “I’ve had patients who have lost as much or more weight with Qsymia as they do with GLP-1s,” Grunvald said. “It’s about finding that lock and key for a particular individual.”[Read: Ozempic can turn into No-zempic]Depending on that fit, a patient may end up saving quite a bit of money. Since 2016, Sarah Ro, a primary-care physician based in Hillsborough, North Carolina, has run a weight-management program that serves rural communities. She’s been treating patients with the older drugs, she told me, and getting good results: “I regularly have people losing 50 pounds on phentermine alone, or phentermine-topiramate.” These drugs are generally covered by insurance, but Ro prescribes them as generics that are cheap enough to pay for out of pocket either way. “It’s like 10 to 11 bucks for phentermine, and 12 bucks for topiramate,” she said. A similar month’s supply of Wegovy or Zepbound injections is listed at more than $1,000.“I have to be honest with you, the whole craze and wave of uptake of the GLP-1 medications was a little bit of a surprise to me,” Grunvald said. “We had this decade of drugs that were actually effective, but people really didn’t latch onto them.” Again, he emphasized the obvious fact that the GLP-1 medications work much better, overall, than the old ones. But he and other experts with whom I spoke suggested that the higher potency alone cannot explain an utter turnabout in patient demand, from nearly zero to almost unmanageable.Several noted that the older drugs are “stigmatized,” as Grunvald put it. In particular, a lot of people are wary of phentermine, on account of its status as an amphetamine derivative, and also its connection to the “fen-phen” scandal of the 1990s, when it was sold as part of an enormously popular (and effective) drug combination that turned out to have dangerous effects on people’s hearts. But as David Saxon of the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus explained to me, the problems with fen-phen derived from the “fen” and not the “phen”—which is to say, a different drug called fenfluramine. “Phen,” for its part, has been prescribed as a weight-loss drug for more than half a century—far longer than any GLP-1 agonist has been on the market—and has shown no clear signs of causing serious problems. Its known side effects are similar to those of Adderall, a drug that is now used by more than 40 million Americans.Topiramate brings other risks, including birth defects, tingling sensations, and changes in mood. Especially at higher doses, it can lead to brain fog. But again, the specifics here will vary from one patient to the next. And GLP-1s have their own side effects, most notably gastrointestinal distress that can be quite unpleasant. About one-sixth of people taking semaglutide are forced to stop; a guest on Oprah’s special said she had to quit after ending up in the emergency room, vomiting blood. Some of these patients may do just fine on phentermine or topiramate. “Honestly, I see more side effects with the GLP-1 drugs than with the other drugs,” Grunvald told me. “I get more messages and phone calls about side effects than I used to.”Some of the older drugs’ peculiar side effects can even wind up being useful, Ro suggested. Many of her patients with obesity are fond of Mountain Dew, she told me; some are drinking two liters every day. She counsels cutting back on sugary beverages, but topiramate can really help, because it can distort the taste of carbonation. In the clinical literature, this dysgeusia is deemed unwanted—it’s called a “taste perversion.” For Ro, it can be a tool for weaning off unhealthy habits. “We have such a wonderful response to using topiramate,” she said.Now she’s girding for the change in North Carolina’s health-insurance coverage for state workers. She tells her patients not to panic; if they can’t afford to pay for Wegovy or Zepbound out of pocket, she can switch them to different agents. “Everybody’s talking about GLP-1s, and it’s like, ‘GLP-1s or bust,’” she said. “And I’m going, ‘Hello! You know, my patients never had that much access to GLP-1s anyway.’” Those patients may not end up getting the best possible treatments for obesity—add this to the running list of health disparities—but they can have a drug that works. For anyone who is living with meaningful complications of obesity, having some weight loss will likely be better than having none at all.If Oprah never got the memo, the problem may have less to do with medicine than with expectation. The older drugs can work, but their average effects on body weight are in the range of 5 to 10 percent, which is about what some people can expect to achieve through major changes to their lifestyle. “Remember, you’re fighting against the cultural current that says, ‘What, you’re taking one of those medicines? That’s awful! You ought to be able to do that yourself,’” Ted Kyle, a pharmacist and an obesity-policy consultant, told me. “The efficacy is not enough to get you over that hump of cultural resistance, and of the stigma attached to taking medicines for obesity.” And then, when a patient on an older drug has reached their new plateau for body weight, which could be just 10 pounds less than where they were before, they may not be so inclined to keep up with their prescription. Are they really going to stay on a medication for the rest of their life, if its effects are not utterly transformative?Again, it all depends on who you are. Just like the drugs, lifestyle interventions must be used indefinitely, and just like the drugs, they may work out great for certain patients and be of little help to others. “There are some people who get a response to a diet that is comparable to bariatric surgery,” Kyle told me. “It’s just not many of them. And it takes a really smart provider of obesity care to say, ‘You know what, I’m going to work with you to get you to your best possible outcomes.’” (Many primary-care doctors simply aren’t trained in how to use the older drugs, Ro said.) If we aren’t ready to give up on recommending healthy diets and more exercise, then let’s not forget the other options. These drugs work. The weight-loss revolution didn’t start in 2021.
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Obama, the Protagonist
Like so many others, I first watched him speak on the night of the 2004 Democratic convention, the year John Kerry became the nominee. He was still a state senator then, his face unlined, his head full of dark-brown hair. He humbly told the audience that his presence there was “pretty unlikely.” His Kenyan father had grown up herding goats; his paternal grandfather cooked for a British soldier. In a Baptist cadence, he quoted from the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s words are stirring on their own, but when a certain kind of orator gets hold of them, the effect can feel like thunder, or the Spirit. The country had tumbled into a new century after a contested election and the start of a war in Iraq. Barack Obama spun a convincing vision of the nation as “one people,” in which our ethnic, religious, and ideological differences mattered little.When I think about what Obama meant to me at the time, my eyes pool with water. I was fresh out of college, taken by the force of his intellect and the way his ideas seemed to cohere and hum. His ear for language was evident in his oratory and in his prose. Dreams From My Father, his first memoir, drew from a humanist tradition of American autobiography laid down by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Toni Morrison’s eulogy of Baldwin in 1987 seemed to foreshadow what many would feel about Obama in 2008: “You made American English honest … You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane.”And yet, it wasn’t enough; the reverie wouldn’t, couldn’t last. In Great Expectations, Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel, the New Yorker writer and critic assesses the hope and disillusionment of the Obama years in a thinly veiled political satire-cum-bildungsroman featuring an Obama-like junior senator as “the candidate,” as well as a multifarious cast of supporting characters who employ their savvy, money, and connections to get him elected as president. Cunningham takes the reader back to a time when many thought Obama had an answer for every American ailment: He would usher the country into a post-race era, offering white people grace and absolution while assuring Black people that they would hereafter get a fair shake.The novel is a keen look back at the failed promise of those early years, during which the country’s lofty expectations left little room for the candidate’s human fallibility—and obscured the reality of American politics. In this country, progress has usually happened in complicated, nonlinear ways: Hard-won advances are generally followed by forceful backlash and heartbreaking setbacks. Advances in civil rights, economic equality, health-care access, or environmental policy have often triggered reactionary codas; since at least the end of Reconstruction, momentum toward multiracial democracy has inflamed particularly vitriolic responses. Ultimately, Cunningham’s novel reminds the reader that simple solutions—the passage of one just law, the election of a single great leader—are seldom a match for American problems.[Read: The political novel gets very, very specific]The narrator—based on the author himself, who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign and in his White House—is David Hammond, a 22-year-old single father from uptown Manhattan. Floundering after dropping out of college, he joins the campaign as a fundraising assistant on the recommendation of the well-heeled mother of a teen boy he tutors. As the novel roves from Manhattan to Manchester, New Hampshire; from Los Angeles to Chicago, David, whose true ambition is to be a writer, uses his new role to sharpen his ear and eye. He’s middling at the minutiae of the job but great at interacting with people. He makes friends with his co-workers and stumbles into a tender love affair with another staffer named Regina. Along the way, he loses slivers of his innocence as he sees what lies beneath the campaign’s shimmering exterior: the candidate’s aloofness when he is offstage, the financial improprieties of a few wealthy patrons. Eventually, the blind allegiance of the candidate’s supporters—their belief that the campaign is a “move of God”—begins to feel foreboding.David often invokes the ecstatic mysticism of religious devotion as a metaphor for the candidate’s hold on his supporters. The senator “reminded me of my pastor,” David says early on, his regal posture bringing to mind a “talismanic maneuver meant to send forth subliminal messages about confidence and power.” One night, on the trail in New Hampshire, David tells Regina about a magic trick he’d witnessed as a teenager: While waiting outside of church with his friends, he’d watched as a magician performed a standard sleight of hand, then levitated a few inches off the city pavement. “Everybody screamed. It was mayhem,” David remembers. “Black people love magic,” Regina rejoins, through laughter. It is a detour in a novel of detours and roundabouts, and also a parable that smartly explains how the candidate’s fervent admirers could be so awed by his charisma that they missed the signs of trouble to come.Sometimes David allows himself to get carried away like everyone else. He thinks about how the candidate and his family had begun to embody some kind of national fantasy of a Black Camelot. “Maybe there was the hope that black, that portentous designation, could finally be subsumed into the mainstream in the way that Kennedy had helped Irish to be. That some long passage of travel was almost done,” he thinks at one point. In that same stream of thought, David suggests that the public’s belief in the candidate’s ability to dismantle the racial hierarchy is largely thanks to his symbolic appeal: It was, he observes, “mostly the look” of the candidate and his glamorous family—an elegant wife and two small daughters—that made supporters believe he could overcome racism. Who wouldn’t want to accept them?[Read: Our new postracial myth]Privy to the campaign’s disappointments and its weaknesses, David is clear-eyed where others are credulous. With the benefit of hindsight, the reader knows his skepticism would eventually be validated. In the years since Obama’s election, America has seen the birtherism movement, the rise of the Tea Party, Trump’s presidency, and the dismantling of cornerstone civil-rights victories, including key portions of the Voting Rights Act. Then, of course, there were Obama’s own shortcomings during his presidency, namely his capitulation to forces opposed to his most idealistic visions. He would pass a new health-care bill, but fall short of the goal of universal coverage he campaigned on. He would withdraw troops from Afghanistan but begin a series of what the political scientist Michael J. Boyle called “shadow wars,” which were “fought by Special Forces, proxy armies, drones, and other covert means.” According to the Council on Foreign Relations, drone strikes authorized by President Obama led to the deaths of nearly 4,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; more than 300 of them were civilians.When Cunningham’s novel closes on that fateful night in November, the night of the candidate’s victory, it’s an ending for David, a graduation, even. The book implies that he will go on to work for the new president, but unlike everyone else in that ecstatic moment, he looks to the coming years soberly, acknowledging that the campaign had spoken “a language of signs,” wherein the symbolism of the moment overwhelmed all else. Already, he seems to know that the country will see no grand, lasting transformation. For many Americans, who felt on a similar, actual night, that the world seemed on the precipice of change, the lessons would take much longer to learn.
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Good Luck Fighting Disinformation
In April 2022, Nick Sawyer sat down before a committee of the California State Assembly to argue for legislation to help limit the spread of COVID falsehoods. Sawyer, an emergency-room physician, had become frustrated by what he saw as the failure of his profession to respond to doctors sharing false information about the pandemic. He’d co-founded an advocacy group, No License for Disinformation (NLFD), and now he was testifying in favor of legislation that warned doctors of professional consequences for misleading patients about the coronavirus—prescribing ivermectin as a COVID cure, for example, or claiming that COVID vaccines would magnetize their blood.“We’ve got to stop the disinformation pipeline,” Sawyer told the committee.Five months later, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law. But for Sawyer and other proponents of the bill, known as AB 2098, the victory was short-lived. The legislation immediately became snarled in First Amendment challenges. Sawyer and his colleagues at NLFD—overwhelmed by harassment from COVID skeptics and frustrated by the sluggishness of medical authorities in responding to falsehoods—decided to close the organization’s doors. And a year after AB 2098 became law, Newsom quietly signed another bill repealing it.The collapse of No License for Disinformation, and of AB 2098, is a cautionary tale about why the harmful falsehoods flooding American life are so difficult to control, even when enormous efforts are made to do so. Sawyer and his colleagues believed that disinformation could be clearly identified and successfully countered—that the industry consensus would support them, that allies would line up behind them, that their professional organization had the power to tamp down those untruths. All of these assumptions proved wrong, to varying degrees. The market for lies still has no shortage of buyers and sellers, and few, if any, levers exist that can directly change this dynamic.In the early months of the pandemic, when New York City’s hospitals were breaking under the strain of patients sick with the new virus, medical workers from across the country arrived to volunteer in the city’s health-care system. Sawyer was one of them. Based in California, he traveled to Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, one of the hardest-hit facilities in a city devastated by COVID. At one point, he looked out of a window while treating a patient and saw two refrigerated trucks used to store bodies of the dead.The experience left Sawyer furious over the increasing spread of falsehoods about the virus and, as time went on, the lifesaving vaccines as well. He and a fellow California emergency physician, Taylor Nichols, saw patients who became seriously ill or died after having declined the vaccine. Some would demand to be treated with ivermectin or refuse to be tested for COVID because they believed the swab would infect them. Sawyer and Nichols were appalled to see reports of other health-care workers around the country lending these ineffective treatments and conspiracy theories credibility.Most prominent among this group was the organization America’s Frontline Doctors, which denounced pandemic restrictions and promoted debunked or unproven COVID cures. A video filmed by the group in July 2020, in which people wearing white coats stood arrayed on the steps of the Supreme Court while discouraging masking and advocating for the use of hydroxychloroquine, spread rapidly across social media when then-President Donald Trump promoted it on Twitter. As the pandemic went on, the group adopted baseless criticisms of the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and reportedly began offering prescriptions of ivermectin, which studies have shown to be ineffective as a COVID treatment but remains popular among those opposed to the vaccine.[James Hamblin: Why does the president keep pushing a malaria drug?]As a small but influential number of doctors spread pandemic falsehoods, health-care workers and advocates began asking why authorities weren’t doing more to stop them. On paper, many state laws provide medical boards with the authority to investigate doctors who deceive patients or the public about health concerns such as the coronavirus. These boards, which are public entities authorized by state governments, provide doctors with their licenses to practice medicine, and have the power to suspend or remove that license.In July 2021, the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), a nonprofit association of state medical regulators, got involved—announcing that “physicians who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.” That risk wasn’t new—doctors who “act in certain ways that could be harmful to patients” have always faced potential discipline, Humayun Chaudhry, the FSMB’s president and CEO, told me. But in the midst of concerns about pandemic falsehoods, Chaudhry explained, the federation’s statement was meant as a “reminder.”Sawyer contacted medical authorities at the FSMB and the California Medical Board to ask how they intended to put the federation’s suggestion into action. But, he said, nothing happened. “We were waiting for somebody to step up to protect the institutions that were being attacked,” Sawyer told me. “And after a while, when that didn’t happen, we decided to create No License for Disinformation.”The FSMB denied that it had failed to respond to Sawyer’s outreach. “We appreciate his group’s efforts to bring attention to this issue of physician misinformation,” Chaudhry said of Sawyer’s work, pointing to what he described as NLFD’s “productive conversations with FSMB as well as with individual state medical boards.” The California Medical Board declined to comment.In September 2021, Sawyer, Nichols, and a group of other doctors unveiled their new organization in a Washington Post op-ed. “State medical boards must immediately act to revoke the medical licenses of doctors who use their professional status to deliberately mislead patients for reasons of politics or profit,” they argued. No License for Disinformation would provide a website where members of the public could report doctors spreading lies to state medical boards, which could investigate them and potentially suspend or remove their licenses to practice medicine.The goal, Sawyer explained to me, was to “try and actually get the medical boards to pay attention”—putting pressure on them to take action against those physicians who were using their credentials to spread falsehoods.It’s not hard to find mistruths circulating about the coronavirus online, but those spread by medical professionals carry a particular risk. Wearing a white coat can make even kooky statements seem more believable. “The title of being a physician lends credibility to what people say to the general public,” Chaudhry explained to The New York Times following the FSMB’s July 2021 statement. “That’s why it is so important that these doctors don’t spread misinformation.”I met Sawyer and Nichols in the summer of 2022, when I interviewed them for a podcast series about online falsehoods. By that point, No License for Disinformation had co-published a report with the de Beaumont Foundation, a public-health nonprofit, arguing for reforms to state medical boards’ authorities and practices to better respond to the doctors whose “lies, distortions, and baseless conspiracy theories have caused unnecessary suffering and death and are prolonging the pandemic.” Some doctors had faced discipline for prescribing ivermectin or advising patients against wearing masks, but overall Sawyer and Nichols remained frustrated by what they saw as inexcusable inaction by state medical boards and other institutions.Fueled by this frustration, NLFD took a more aggressive strategy than many other groups working to counter pandemic falsehoods. Instead of focusing on promoting good information over bad, the organization sought to cut misperceptions off at the source. It ran an active, pugnacious Twitter account, accusing particular doctors of being responsible for spreading falsehoods and demanding that they be held accountable. It also backed AB 2098, the California legislation, which clarified the California Medical Board’s authority to investigate doctors who advised their patients on the basis of knowing lies or falsehoods “contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus.”But what exactly does “consensus” mean? It’s not always easy to identify precisely what’s true and what’s false, or to decide who should be responsible for making that determination. When I first interviewed Sawyer and Nichols, they took this critique seriously but argued that their advocacy focused on claims that couldn’t possibly be subject to reasoned debate, such as the notion that vaccines caused AIDS or injected patients with microchips. “Having all these academic debates about disinformation takes away the strength of the word lie,” Sawyer said when we spoke again in April 2023—“lies that are killing people.”There are legal limits, though, to what state medical boards can do. As government entities, they’re bound by the First Amendment—which restricts their ability to discipline physicians for constitutionally protected speech, especially for public advocacy that’s separate from private conversations with patients in a doctor’s office. “The basis of the First Amendment concerns is the concern about chilling valuable speech,” Carl Coleman, a law professor who studies medical regulation, explained to me. “You don’t want to create an environment where doctors are afraid to question prevailing wisdom.” In his view, “medical boards can play a role in those really, truly egregious cases of flat-out lying, but it’s a fine line.”“This is the history of medicine playing out in real time,” says Jim Downs, the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, who has written about the coronavirus pandemic for The Atlantic. Public-health crises, he told me, commonly involve heated debates over how best to understand the science, and that debate is what pushes medicine forward—though, Downs allowed, doctors who insist that vaccines will magnetize you or fill your blood with microchips are engaging in this conversation “in a very extreme, potentially harmful way.”The story of AB 2098 reflects the difficulty of distinguishing dangerous quackery from productive disagreement, all the while without running afoul of the First Amendment. The initial legislation, introduced by Democratic Assemblymember Evan Low in February 2022, would have allowed the state medical board to investigate doctors who shared “misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19” either publicly or with patients. But the bill provided scarce guidance as to exactly what “misinformation or disinformation” physicians were supposed to avoid, and its seeming prohibition on public remarks by doctors questioning the medical consensus raised serious problems under the First Amendment.Lawmakers later tightened the definition of “misinformation or disinformation” and narrowed the bill to focus only on medical advice provided to patients, leaving public-facing speech untouched. That put AB 2098 on firmer First Amendment footing, but meant that the legislation would do little to constrain the influence of doctors who promoted falsehoods in viral tweets. It also constrained the law’s scope to the degree that, by the time Newsom signed the bill in September 2022, it wasn’t even clear whether AB 2098 would actually grant the state medical board any new powers in addition to its existing authority to investigate “unprofessional conduct.” Still, the No License for Disinformation team hoped that the legislation would push state authorities to take action. “Through public vigilance, we can reinforce the Medical Board of California’s commitment to its mission,” Sawyer wrote in an op-ed defending the law against critics.NLFD’s advocacy in favor of AB 2098 placed Sawyer, Nichols, and their colleagues under a new level of scrutiny. They’d previously faced online threats in response to their work. And in December 2021, they’d watched closely when Kristina Lawson, then the president of California’s medical board, announced on Twitter that she’d been “followed and confronted by a group that peddles medical disinformation,” which she said “ambushed” her in a parking garage. Press reports identified the group as America’s Frontline Doctors. Several months later, America’s Frontline Doctors released a video showing footage of Lawson being questioned in a parking garage by a “physician investigator,” who described the incident as an “interview” conducted in “a public place, with witnesses.”But after No License for Disinformation backed AB 2098 in the spring of 2022, Nichols told me, “that was sort of the tipping point” in terms of public attention. That May, Sawyer and NLFD received a letter from Simone Gold, a leader of America’s Frontline Doctors, stating that Gold would file suit against Sawyer and the group if they failed to retract its criticisms of Gold and her organization. (America’s Frontline Doctors did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Without legal counsel or much in the way of funds on hand, Sawyer scrambled to find a lawyer to represent him pro bono.The lawsuit never materialized. But NLFD began receiving waves of online threats after opponents of AB 2098 criticized the group as authoritarian and censorious. Commenters deluged the group with death threats and ominous promises to hold it accountable under “Nuremberg 2.0,” a reference to a far-right idea that doctors who support vaccinations will one day be tried and executed. Frustrated, tired, and frightened, Sawyer and Nichols decided to shut the organization down in October 2022.“We were getting threats of stalking and harassment,” Nichols said. “And legal threats and threats against our financial and job security. And for what?” For all the group had done, he explained, “no one was being held accountable” for the harm they’d caused by spreading lies. The overwhelming majority of the doctors that No License for Disinformation had identified as popularizing untruths still had their credentials intact, and the Americans who’d bought into those falsehoods still believed them.[Deb Roy: How to tackle truth decay ]AB 2098, meanwhile, was in trouble. Despite the revisions to the bill, and a signing statement by Newsom emphasizing the narrowness of the legislation, multiple lawsuits sprouted up challenging its constitutionality under the First Amendment—supported by groups including the anti-vaccine organization run by the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and two California chapters of the ACLU, which objected to AB 2098 on civil-liberties grounds. This fall, while an appeals court was weighing the law’s constitutionality, the California legislature put an end to the drama by voting, with little fanfare, to repeal the law.Despite the short life of No License for Disinformation, Richard Baron, who leads the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), told me that the group’s work has left an impact. His organization, one of many private certifying boards that credential doctors’ skill in particular specialties, has highlighted the importance of responding to medical misinformation both through debunking and by potentially taking disciplinary action against board-certified physicians lending credence to falsehoods. “When physicians spread information that is clearly wrong, ABIM has a rigorous, fair and confidential disciplinary process in place to deal with unethical or unprofessional behavior,” Baron wrote in May 2022. In an interview, he told me that No License for Disinformation’s insistence on accountability “galvanized us—and others—to act.”Yet in the current political environment, action is a contentious proposition. The flood of confusion and falsehoods around the pandemic, along with the surge of lies about the integrity of the 2020 election, led to pressure on both government officials and social-media platforms to respond more aggressively to potentially harmful misrepresentations polluting the public sphere. NLFD’s work was part of that push. Now, though, the United States is in a moment of retrenchment against such efforts—encouraged by Elon Musk’s gleeful destruction of Twitter’s moderation capabilities, and further reinforced by a campaign of attacks against misinformation research led by Republican lawmakers in Congress. In June 2023, the National Institutes of Health announced that it was placing on hold a planned research program meant to study health communication on social media. Many state medical boards are struggling with efforts by Republican governors and legislators to limit their authority to investigate doctors who spread falsehoods or prescribe unproven COVID treatments.The difficulty of responding to falsehoods about COVID isn’t just because of the First Amendment or institutional inaction. It’s because there’s political benefit in promoting those falsehoods, and political, legal, and even physical danger for those who oppose them. Lies, it turns out, have a constituency.That constituency uses harassment as a tool to silence those who disagree, as Sawyer and Nichols discovered—a way to raise the cost of pushing back. Reporting and research have documented how both misinformation researchers and health-care workers seeking to combat pandemic falsehoods have struggled under the weight of online threats. Among the doctors affected by such harassment is Natalia Solenkova, a Florida critical-care physician who collaborated with the NLFD team and was later targeted with online abuse after a faked tweet of hers began circulating widely among anti-vaccine activists and was promoted by Joe Rogan. (Rogan later apologized.) “Whoever speaks about disinformation immediately gets harassed,” Solenkova told me. “And there is no institution that can support you.” She still posts about health care and COVID on social media, but worries about the security of her job if another, more convincing, fake begins to circulate.Reflecting on her initial efforts with NLFD to respond to COVID lies, Solenkova seemed to look back on that early idealism with resignation. She explained to me over email that the organization’s work had been motivated by the belief that responding to falsehoods was largely a project of spreading truth. If No License for Disinformation could identify those falsehoods and explain their dangers clearly enough, the group had reasoned, then surely medical authorities would take action. But, she wrote, “we were naive.”
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theatlantic.com
The War at Stanford
One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”I switched to a different computer-science section.Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.[Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free speech culture ]Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”“We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence.The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying. Protests at Stanford. Sources: Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu / Getty Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Let the activists have their loathsome rallies]When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was “a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that concerned with the truth.At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.[David Frum: There is no right to bully and harass]I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.For so long, Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”That didn’t work.About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.The conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.“But are you a Zionist?”“Yes.”“Then we are enemies.”
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theatlantic.com