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Just 50 days before his reelection, Donald Trump took the time to hawk a new crypto platform.If the country does not build out its cryptocurrency ecosystem, “we’re not going to be the biggest, and we have to be the biggest and the best,” Trump said on a livestream on X. “It’s very young and very growing. And if we don’t do it, China’s going to do it.” The livestream was sponsored by World Liberty Financial, which has given Trump the title “chief crypto advocate” and his sons, Barron, Eric, and Donald Jr., that of “Web3 ambassador.”World Liberty Financial is the brainchild of Zak Folkman (the creator of an advisory firm called Date Hotter Girls LLC) and Chase Herro (an affiliate marketer who previously sold colon cleanses). It is a get-rich-quick scheme, and not one that seems designed to enrich its customers.It is also an emblem of a financial world that Trump’s election seems set to supercharge, populated by young men who have seen their economic prospects stagnate, their faith in the United States falter, and a champion in a baggy business suit and a red baseball cap emerge. Think of it as the bro-economy: a volatile, speculative, and extremely online casino, in which the house is already winning big.[Christopher Beam: The worst of crypto is yet to come]Its first major market sector: day-trading. I don’t mean old-fashioned, small-dollar equity investing done at the kitchen table. I mean hyper-speculative betting done with borrowed money on mobile apps, as investors shitpost and infinite-scroll. Market-moving rumors come not from corporate conferences, but from sites like YouTube and the Subreddit WallStreetBets (tagline: “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”). Users at times coordinate to buy up a certain stock with the explicit goal of screwing over a hedge fund that had bet the stock would go down.That’s what happened four years ago with GameStop: Redditors helped to push the share price up 8,000 percent. Now so-called meme stocks are resurgent. GameStop spiked this spring. Tesla climbed when Trump won. (Tesla is both a blue-chip stock and a meme stock; Elon Musk, the company’s founder, is one of Trump’s biggest donors and closest advisers, as well as being a storied internet troll and the owner of the social-media platform X.) “This rally seems unsustainable, even if you believe in the long-term growth story for the stock,” David Wagner of Aptus Capital Advisors told Bloomberg. “It makes no sense.”As noted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, this trading behavior is in part driven by market democratization. A decade ago, the fintech firm Robinhood pioneered commission-free trading, allowing individuals to buy stocks or other financial assets without paying any fees. Today’s apps also allow users to purchase fractions of a stock and do not set minimum balances, ushering in less wealthy investors.The barriers to entry are low, yet the risks are high. Today’s young day-traders tend to make frequent transactions and gravitate toward exotic trades, when research shows that investors generate the best returns when they make simple investments infrequently. The apps encourage the piling-on of risk through push alerts, promotions, and other gamifications.The second crucial market sector: sports betting. In 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a 1992 law banning commercial sports betting outside of Nevada. That paved the way for more than three dozen states to okay the practice; 30 states also allow residents to make wagers online.It would be hard to overstate how much this has changed pro sports and the fan experience over the past half decade. Commentators talk about fantasy leagues and prop bets as much as they talk about the game; advertisements for sportsbooks are ubiquitous; millions of spectators keep DraftKings and FanDuel up on their second screen. An estimated two in five American adults engage in sport betting. One in four online bettors has wagered more than $500 in a single day. Americans staked $120 billion last year, double what they did in 2021.Many die-hard fans love the rise of sports betting: It’s entertaining, engaging, a way to support your favorite players and dunk on your friends. Still, in a survey, 37 percent of online bettors said they “felt bad or ashamed” for losing money. Nearly 40 percent said they bet more than they should; nearly 20 percent said they lied about the extent of their betting, and the same share said they lost cash that was meant for their day-to-day financial obligations. A strong majority supported the federal government “aggressively” regulating the market, “to specifically protect customers from compulsive gambling.”Third and last is crypto, which boomed into the mainstream a decade ago. Today, roughly one in three young people has traded in or used crypto. Sites such as Robinhood and Coinbase make purchasing easy. (Buying bitcoin used to take significant know-how and days of waiting.) The most recent bust, in 2022, seems to have done little to deter crypto’s most ardent fans.There might be more of them soon. For years, Trump was anti-crypto. “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he wrote on Twitter five years ago. He added: “We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the World, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”Today, he’s not just promoting shady crypto start-ups. He’s promising regulation that would allow banks to offer crypto assets to clients, making the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” Industry-friendly rules would lead to a flood of cash entering the crypto markets, enriching anyone with assets already in their wallets, but also increasing volatility and exposing millions more Americans to scams, frauds, and swindles.Day-trading, sports betting, and crypto are three floors in one bustling, high-stakes casino. Many folks trade crypto and meme stocks on the same platform, thumbing over to a second app to keep their sports bets going, thumbing over again to post their wins and losses. Apps have made the experience social. They have also made staking money as frictionless as ordering Uber Eats.[Charles Fain Lehman: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake]The players in this casino are overwhelmingly young men, roughly 40 percent of whom are into sports betting and crypto. (A smaller minority is actively trading.) No surprise, Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me, when I called to ask about the bro-economy. “Risk skews male, period, for good and for ill,” he said. “There’s this greater willingness, appetite for, vulnerability to, tolerance of risk.” He appreciated how the activities gave guys something to do together and talk about with one another. He also noted how many young men felt shut out of traditional wealth-building strategies, such as homeownership.Still, the bro-economy exploits its users’ penchant for risk. Crypto companies and betting sites do not generate value; they take cash from their users, reshuffle it, and redistribute it, while keeping a cut for themselves. Postmodern trading platforms encourage excess, making their margins on esoteric trades and superfluous volume. The casino lacks guardrails, not to benefit the bettors, but to benefit the house.Musk and Trump have given young men something to aspire to. But their ascendance makes the stricter regulation of the bro-economy unlikely—and, in the case of crypto, makes deregulation a sure thing. Guys are about to lose billions and billions of dollars a year on apps designed to obscure risk and keep them coming back for a dopamine hit. Trump and Musk can afford to lose huge sums. Most young American men cannot.

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President-elect Donald Trump looks on during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on November 16, 2024, in New York City. | Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC It’s been two weeks since the presidential election and there has been no shortage of autopsies. If anything surprised me about the outcome, it’s not that Donald Trump won, but how he did it. The president-elect won all seven swing states and the popular vote, and seemed to gain ground with basically every demographic except college-educated women. That is a political reckoning for the Democratic Party. All we can definitively say at this point is that there are many reasons for this electoral defeat and we just don’t know enough right now to parse it out in a satisfying way. But that doesn’t mean that we have no idea what happened. What is fairly clear is that the roughly 76 million people who voted for Trump were saying “no” to something — or, to be more precise, they were saying “no” to lots of things. And I am genuinely interested in understanding what — apart from the Biden administration — so many people were rejecting, and what lessons we might be able to draw from that. So in the aftermath of the election, I invited Vox’s own Zack Beauchamp on The Gray Area to talk about what we know and what it could mean for our political future. Beauchamp writes a newsletter for Vox called On the Right, which is all about the evolving nature of conservatism and the various ideas and movements driving it. He’s also the author of a recent book called The Reactionary Spirit. We discuss the competing accounts of this election, the differences between conservative and reactionary parties, as well as some of the broader trends in democratic societies across the world. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing Now that we’ve all had a little time to process it, what do you make of the election results? Zack Beauchamp I would say we should separate out two different things. One is our analysis of what’s happening, and the other is how we feel about what happened. Analytically, I think it’s still pretty early to have any really strong conclusions, but I will say that most of what people are saying as a result of that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If you notice, there’s a one-to-one correlation between someone’s very detailed account of what happened in the election and their own priors about how politics works. You mentioned that Trump gained ground with basically every group, right? Well, that only happens, this kind of uniform swing, when there’s some big structural factor at play. The candidates that make sense to explain a shift from 2020 to 2024 are inflation, right? That’s new and has been politically potent everywhere, and historically, in the US it matters. And anti-incumbent sentiment, which is a worldwide fact and true in democracies around the world. But Harris’s biggest losses were in blue states, and that suggests that something is going on beyond messaging. Something else is happening. Sean Illing Let’s set aside the election for a minute, though we’re going to keep coming back to it. When someone asks you what is American conservatism in 2024, what is your answer? Zack Beauchamp It’s not conservatism. What we call the conservative movement today is not what the conservative movement historically has been in the United States. It’s a species of reactionary politics. The distinction rests in the party’s fundamental attitude towards democracy and democratic institutions.  The old Republican Party, for all of its faults, played by the political rules. It had faith in the idea that elections determine the winner, and that when elections happen, you accept the verdict of the people and you adjust based on that regardless of whether or not you like the policy preferences.  Reactionary parties are different from conservatism. They both share an orientation towards believing that certain ways in which society is arranged — certain setups, institutions, even hierarchies — are good and necessary. There’s value in the way that things are. What differs between the two of them is that conservative parties don’t see potential social change as an indictment of democracy. That is to say, even if a democracy or an election produces an outcome that they don’t like, that threatens to transform wholesale certain elements of the social order, a conservative would not throw out the political order as a consequence of that. Reactionaries are willing to do that. My view is, at the core of the Trump movement, which I want to distinguish from every Trump supporter because they’re not the same, but the people who have given Donald Trump an iron grip on the Republican Party, that base of hardcore support, are animated primarily by reactionary politics, by a sense that things have gone too far in a socially liberal and culturally liberal, and even in some cases economically liberal direction, and they want things to go back to partially a past that never existed, but also a past that did exist where there was a little bit more order and structure in terms of who was in charge and what the rules were. Sean Illing What Trumpism seems to be, increasingly, is a rejection of the ruling elites, a rejection of the professional managerial class, which is more about class and culture than race and the preservation of traditional hierarchies. So how do you make sense of that? Zack Beauchamp When we talk about what Trumpism is, we need to specify what we’re talking about. And I don’t think [that means] looking at a general election and saying that every person who voted for Trump is necessarily a Trumpist. If somebody was considering voting for Harris or maybe voted for Democrats down ballot, it might not make sense to think of their behavior through a purely ideological lens, because they may not even have firm ideological beliefs. Many swing voters, if you look at the way they talk about politics, it’s sort of jumbled. Again, I’m not saying that they are bad for having jumbled views, but this is just a fact about people who don’t pay attention to politics very much. If you look at Trump’s core supporters though, the story of racial and social grievance, anger about immigration, a sense of alienation from the United States after Obama really personalized the changing social order — all of that is remarkably consistent among the people who will turn out to vote for Trump in a Republican primary. It’s been true over and over again. The evidence is overwhelmingly strong. This is their core motivation in Trump politics and in being engaged in this movement. And nothing about this election result changes that.  What that part of the story does is help us understand why Trump has gained control over one of our two major political parties, why it is that he crushed traditional Republicans who were unwilling to give those voters what they wanted in such clear terms, and those voters had become a majority of the Republican Party internally. And more than that, it’s why the bulk of Republicans rejected the 2020 election when previously they had believed elections were legitimate. It’s why so many people were willing to swallow the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. So that’s one category of explanation, but then we’re talking about shifts in coalitions between different elections, and here the analysis becomes a lot trickier because we’re not talking about what makes up the core of an ideological movement, because all of those voters are baked into voting for Trump no matter what. I mean, you have 46 or 47 percent of the electorate that’s not going to change their mind no matter what on both sides. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. So you end up having these voters in the middle, and what causes someone to change their votes between elections is not the same thing as what engages really highly motivated, highly ideological voters who make up a political movement. They’re swing voters, right? They’re not Trumpists in the clear sense just because they voted for Trump once. So collapsing that distinction leads to analytic mistakes.  Sean Illing I continue to have a hard time parsing out all the forces that are combining to scramble our politics. There’s so much alienation. It’s a very lonely society. Our democracy doesn’t feel very participatory for lots of people, so there’s not enough investment in it. I think social media, media fragmentation more generally, the collapse of consensus reality — it’s all been very destabilizing. And I’m just going to keep saying that I think millions of people have never experienced real political disorder, so they take liberal democracy for granted and frankly don’t take politics very seriously. They’re entertained by Trump. They think he’s funny, and maybe he’ll make eggs a little cheaper and also drive annoying coastal elites insane and that’s kind of it for plenty of people. Zack Beauchamp Yeah, I think that’s true for a lot of people. Especially that point about taking liberal democracy for granted. When you live in a political order for a long period of time, you start to take it as a baseline. This is the way that things are. It’s not that you can’t even envision fundamental change — it’s that you don’t even have the vocabulary necessary or the sense of perspective necessary to believe that you should be envisioning radical change. It just doesn’t enter into your daily life. If you look at interviews with swing voters and the way that they talk about politics or when you talk to them yourselves, the sense that you get is not that these people are like, “I want to burn American democracy to the ground.” It’s that they’ve got a choice between two candidates, like they do every election, and they pick the one who represents whatever their grievances are at this moment in time or whatever their anger or frustration or even hopes and dreams are at this moment in time. Lots of different things go into for a voter that changes their mind election to election, what speaks to that. And the stuff about who Trump really is and what he really stands for, the system-threatening part of it, just doesn’t even register because it seems too remote to feel real. Sean Illing I don’t think Trump is really committed to anything. I have always felt that his political genius consists in making himself into an avatar onto which people can project whatever they need to project and he’s so well-equipped to be this kind of vehicle. I genuinely do not think he cares about anything other than himself. I mean, if the man had to choose between preserving liberal democracy for another century or building a beautiful new golf course in Saudi Arabia, is there any doubt he’d build the fucking golf course? Zack Beauchamp No, but I think that that’s a mistake. Because it’s not that he doesn’t have a commitment to democracy in the sense that he’s not attached to it. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like the idea that he can’t do whatever he wants when he gets power. He gets very angry when people say, “You can’t do that,” or, “That’s illegal.” And he openly admires leaders in other countries who have either always been authoritarians, like Xi Jinping in China, or who have torn down their own democracies like Putin [in Russia] or Viktor Orbán in Hungary. He thinks that they’re strong and that it’s great that they get to do stuff like that. This is not an ideological commitment to authoritarianism, either. It’s not like Trump has a sincere belief that authoritarian systems work better or deliver better in some kind of meaningful sense. It’s a gut level “I like that. I want to be like that.” It’s when he said in those comments that were recently reported, “I want generals like Hitler’s generals,” it’s not like he was saying, “I want generals who will follow my orders to exterminate the Jews.” He’s saying, “I want people who listen to me and do the things that I say, whatever those things are, however crazy they might seem.” In that sense, he has a gut-level authoritarianism, and it’s reactionary in the sense that he very clearly hates a lot of the social change that has happened.  Sean Illing Do you think our institutions will continue to hold?  Zack Beauchamp Yeah. I mean, I don’t think there’s any reason to expect that elections will be formally abolished by 2028 in the way that some wild-eyed commentators in social media have suggested. I think there is a moderate chance that the fairness of our elections will be severely undermined by then. And I think there is a very high chance that some of the core institutions of American democracy will be damaged in ways that have significant long-term consequences.  Put differently, I don’t think this election itself is the end of American democracy. I do think it is the beginning of the greatest test American democracy has seen since the Civil War of its resilience, and the outcome of that test is not determined and there is a range of probabilities, ranging from truly catastrophic to merely somewhat bad. Sean Illing What makes this to you a more significant test than the first Trump administration? Zack Beauchamp It’s the degree to which they have clear and cogent plans about what they want to do, and the anti-democratic nature of those plans. Coming into office last time, Trump didn’t have a vendetta against large chunks of the government. He didn’t believe an election had been stolen from him and that needed to be rectified. At the very least, he thinks it is a public blemish that needs to be shown to be false to many people, because if many people believe that he won, then that’s good enough. It doesn’t matter if he actually did. What matters, to put it differently, is Donald Trump’s honor, and the honor of Donald Trump must be avenged at all costs, and the insult of 2020 must be erased from the history books. That’s the kind of thing that he cares about. The degree and scope of the planning that has gone into this and the willingness to take a hammer to different institutions and the specificity of the plans for doing so is not normal. To name just one example from Project 2025, they want to prosecute the former Pennsylvania secretary of state who presided over the 2020 elections using the [Ku Klux] Klan Act, which was passed to fight the first Klan. It’s basically alleging that by trying to help people fix improperly filed mail-in ballots in 2020, this Pennsylvania secretary of state was rigging the election, trying to undermine everyone else’s fair exercise of their votes in a way akin to the Klan intimidating Black voters in the 1860s by threatening to lynch them.  When I speak to legal experts about this, they’re like, “No credible prosecutor I know would bring such a charge.” It’s a real abuse of power and anti-democratic in many ways because it’s trying to wield federal power to prevent local authorities from administering elections properly and helping people vote. So in order to try to even begin an investigation on this front, let alone actually prosecute, what you need to do is fire the people who would do that kind of job, which would typically be in the Justice Department Civil Rights Division role, so the Election Crimes Unit and the Criminal Division, fire those people who work on these cases, bring in attorneys who are willing to do what you say, even though it’s ludicrous on the basis of a traditional read of the law, and then initiate an investigation, try to get charges spun up, and then get them to a judge like Aileen Cannon, who’s presiding over Trump’s documents case and has clearly shown herself to not really care about what’s going on, but rather just to interpret the law in whatever way is most favorable to Trump. All of that stuff, and this is just one specific example, illustrates the ways in which doing what Trump and his allies have outlined as part of their revenge campaign requires attacking very fundamental components of American democracy: the building blocks, like the rule of law, like a nonpartisan civil service that treats all citizens equally, like a judiciary that’s designed with interpreting the law as best as it can, rather than delivering policy outlines, you need all of those things in order to act on already offered promises in what is widely understood to be the planning document for the Trump administration. Sean Illing As hard as it is to believe, there’s a shelf life to Trump’s political career and there are people who think our situation will be drastically better the day he leaves. I’m not so sure about that. Are you? Zack Beauchamp Well, I agree with you in brief, but to build on what you’re saying, let’s say Trump dies in office. Then you get President JD Vance, who shares some very similar ideological commitments to the people who want to tear down American democracy. So there’s that. There’s the fact that Trumpist politics have paid off in two presidential elections for Republicans, and I just can’t imagine being a Republican strategist right now and saying what we need to do is go back to 2012. Because even if all you care about is narrowly winning elections, then you’re going to try to be Trump rather than the pre-Trump GOP. There will be a lot of people trying to take up the mantle of Trump’s successor in the Republican Party, and that means doing a lot of the same things that he did. Sean Illing But can they do that effectively? Can anyone else do what Trump has done?  Zack Beauchamp I’m very skeptical of that. If you look comparatively at authoritarian parties that work inside democracies, many of them are led by singular charismatic figures. Not all, but many of the successful ones. There’s this saying in Indian politics that Narendra Modi is the man who has a 56-inch chest. And it’s not literally true, but it’s one of many things that isn’t about him that his supporters say when you talk to them. This sort of mythologizing and grandiose comments stem from Modi’s outsized personality and his ability to connect as a figure with supporters of his party and with a lot of ordinary Indians who might not have supported his party in the past. And I think Trump is much the same way. And that appeal, first of all, is not fixed. Modi, while he won reelection this year, his party took a major hit. They lost their parliamentary majority, and of course Trump lost in 2020. But second is, what happens when he’s gone? We know that this is a huge problem for authoritarian parties in authoritarian countries. They’re often nasty fights over what happens after the big man dies. That seems equally true in authoritarian factions inside democracies, because part of what makes them authoritarian is that they put one guy in charge, and it’s not clear who’s next unless you have something like a monarchy where the rules of succession are clear. But even then, who doesn’t know about nasty fights inside monarchies over who is the true heir to the throne? It’s just a fact of life when you’re not having things settled through a normal democratic procedure. So I just don’t know what’s going to happen after Trump is gone. I can guess, and I think a lot will depend on how his administration manages American public opinion. Not only did Trump end his presidency historically unpopular, but even now, he’s unpopular. There’s a lot of people who really don’t like him, and many of the swing voters could be turned off by things that happened during his presidency, especially if it’s as disruptive as it seems like it might be to ordinary people’s lives. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

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The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read BooksTo read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school, Rose Horowitch wrote in the November 2024 issue.I’m an English teacher at a private college-preparatory school, and much of “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” sounded familiar. My students, too, now struggle to read long texts. Unaddressed in this apt article, though, are changes to the broader high-school context in which reading for homework now occurs. Today, students with elite college aspirations have extracurricular schedules that demand as much—if not more—time than school itself. These commitments are necessary, in their eyes, to gain admission to selective institutions. As a result, teachers face considerable pressure from not only students but also parents and school administrators to limit homework time—no matter if the assignment is a calculus problem set or Pride and Prejudice. In combination with considerably slower rates of reading and diminished reading comprehension, curtailed homework time means that an English teacher might not be able to assign more than 10 to 15 pages of relatively easy prose per class meeting, a rate so excruciatingly slow, it diminishes one’s ability to actually grasp a novel’s meaning and structure. I see how anxious and drained my students are, but I think it’s important for them to experience what can grow from immersive reading and sustained written thought. If we want students to read books, we have to be willing to prioritize the time for them to do so.Anna ClarkSan Diego, Calif.As a professor, I agree with my colleagues who have noticed the declining literacy of American students at elite universities.However, I am not sure if the schools are entirely to blame. In American universities, selection is carried out by admissions offices with little interest in the qualities that faculty might consider desirable in a college student. If faculty members were polled—something that has never happened to me in my 20-year career—I’m sure we would rank interest and experience in reading books quite highly.Admissions decisions in the United States are based on some qualities that, however admirable, have little or nothing to do with academic aptitude. In contrast, at Oxford and Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, undergraduate admissions are typically conducted by the same academics who will teach those students. Most personal statements primarily consist of a discussion of which books the student has read and what they learned from them. Students are then expected to discuss these books in more detail in an interview. When considered alongside the undergraduate selection process, the decline in literacy among American undergraduates is totally understandable.Ione FinePsychology Professor, University of WashingtonSeattle, Wash.Having taught English in a public school for 32 years, I am not surprised that colleges and universities are discovering that incoming students lack the skill, focus, and endurance to read novels. Throughout my career, primarily teaching ninth graders, I fostered student readership not by assigning novels for the whole class to read, but rather by allowing students to select young-adult books that they would read independently in class. Thousands of lifelong readers were created as a result.Ten years ago, however, my district administration told me that I could no longer use class time for independent student reading. Instead, I was to focus on teaching skills and content that the district believed would improve standardized-test scores. Ironically, research showed that the students who read more books scored significantly better than their classmates on standardized reading tests.I knew that many students were unlikely to read at home. So I doubled down: I found time for students to read during the school day and repurposed class time to allow my students to share their ideas; to question, respond, and react along with their peers. The method was so successful that the district adopted my approach for seventh through ninth grade, and I published a university-level textbook preparing teachers to create similar communities of readers in their own classrooms.Whole-class novels just aren’t working: Some students will always be uninterested in a teacher’s choice, and perceive the classics as irrelevant and difficult to comprehend. But allowing students to select their books can help them fall in love with reading.Michael AnthonyReading, Pa.I am an educator of 16 years living in New Hampshire. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” reflects a lot of what I’ve seen recently. But a large piece of the puzzle is public-school budgets. A major reason novels have been removed from curricula is money: Many districts cannot afford to purchase a book for every student, especially in the upper grades. Typically, districts will buy a “class set” of novels, about 20 to 30 books—that’s it. The books must be used during the English blocks for instruction and reading time. There are not enough books for students to take home and read; if they are reading them only in their class block, a novel will take months and months to finish. I knew of one district that would have teachers make copies of entire novels to share with their students; they’d take turns on copy duty to pull it off. I wish I could teach more complete novels, because students love it. But districts need budgets large enough to buy books for everyone.Meaghan KellyRumney, N.H.When teaching my college history courses, I have polled my students to see how many have ever read a book cover to cover. Sometimes, only a few students would raise their hand.I inquired because I always gave them the option to read a book instead of writing a 10-page research paper. They then would have a one-on-one, hour-long discussion with me about the book they’d selected. Students who chose that option generally had a good experience. But one student shines bright in my mind. In truth, I didn’t remember him well—but he stopped me at an alumni function to say thank you. He had taken my class the second semester of his senior year to fill an elective, and he had chosen to read David McCullough’s 1776. He’d devoured the book—and he’d loved our discussion. He told me that the assignment had changed his life: Up to that point, he had never read a whole book. Since that class, he has read two or three books a month, and now has hundreds of books in his own library. He assured me that he would be a reader for the rest of his life.It was one of the most gratifying moments of my career. I hope more teachers, professors, and parents give their students a chance to learn what this student did—that books are one of the great joys in life.Scott SalvatoMooresville, N.C.Rose Horowitch replies:Anna Clark’s letter builds on an idea that I hoped to convey in the article: that the shift away from reading full books is about more than individual students, teachers, or schools. Much of the change can be understood as the consequence of a change in values. The professors I spoke with didn’t think their students were lazy; if anything, they said they were overscheduled and frazzled like never before, facing immense pressure to devote their time to activities that will further their career. Under these circumstances, it can be difficult to see how reading The Iliad in its entirety is a good use of time. Acknowledging this reality can be disheartening, because the solution will not be as simple as changing curricula at the college, high-school, or middle-school level. (And as several of these letters note, changing curricula isn’t all that straightforward.) But letters like Scott Salvato’s are a hopeful reminder of the power of a good—full—book to inspire a student to become a lifelong reader. The Atlantic Behind the CoverIn this month’s cover story, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” David Brooks describes the failure of the United States’ meritocracy, created in part by James Conant, the influential president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant and like-minded reformers had hoped to overturn America’s “hereditary aristocracy of wealth”; instead, they helped create a new ruling class—the so-called cognitive elite, selected and credentialed by the nation’s top universities. For our cover image, the artist Danielle Del Plato placed the story’s headline on pennants she created for each of the eight Ivy League schools, which have been instrumental in shaping and perpetuating America’s meritocracy.— Paul Spella, Senior Art DirectorCorrectionsDue to an editing error, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” (November) misstated the year Nicholas Dames started teaching Literature Humanities. He began teaching the course in 1998, not 1988. “What Zoya Sees” (November) misstated where in Nigeria Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi and her husband, Sunny, have a home. Their home is in Ngwo, not Igwo.This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

Amos Hochstein met with the speaker of the Lebanese Parliament amid efforts to stop the fighting.

An alleged drunk driver was seen zipping around a busy parking lot holding what appeared to be an open container of alcohol after taking Texas State Troopers on a chaotic cross county high-speed chase.

People pose for photos after they’re sworn in as new US citizens. | Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Ending birthright citizenship has been on President-elect Donald Trump’s wishlist for years, and he’s pledged to kill it once and for all in his next term. But ending it may not be as easy as he’s promised.  Under a longstanding interpretation of the Constitution and federal law, children born in the US automatically become American citizens, even if their parents are undocumented. Trump, however, has promised that, “On day one of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the children of illegal immigrants will not receive automatic US citizenship.” Specifically, that executive order would mandate that at least one parent must be a US citizen or green card holder for their child to qualify for automatic citizenship. Federal agencies would be directed to deny passports, Social Security numbers, and public benefits to children with two undocumented parents.  The executive order would almost certainly be challenged in court. Though it’s impossible to say what the Supreme Court may ultimately decide, history and precedent isn’t on Trump’s side.  “I think that birthright citizenship is such a bedrock principle of American law that of all the things on the Trump agenda, this is the one least likely to be successful,” said Hiroshi Motomura, a professor at UCLA School of Law. Trump has framed the policy as a solution to “birth tourism” — when pregnant people travel to the US to give birth in order to secure US citizenship for their child — and a means of removing a pull factor for unauthorized immigration, which has sharply declined at the southern border in 2024. The policy also reflects Trump’s longtime efforts to assert a particular vision of what it means to be American in an era when the US’s white population is declining in numbers. In his first term, he reportedly eschewed immigration from “shithole countries,” referring to Haiti and African countries. And he has more recently claimed that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.  It’s not clear how many people could be impacted by the policy. However, about 5.5 million American citizen children currently live in mixed-status households, some of them with two undocumented parents, which would have made them ineligible for automatic US citizenship under Trump’s proposed policy. That suggests that the affected population of future children born in the US could be large. What the law says The prevailing belief among legal experts is that ending birthright citizenship would require a constitutional amendment, that there is not enough support in Congress to pass one, and that Trump’s proposed executive order would not hold up in court.   “President Trump cannot do this,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean at Berkeley Law school. “President Trump cannot change the Constitution by executive order.” He said that ending birthright citizenship by executive order contravenes the 14th Amendment, which was adopted after the Civil War to ensure that formerly enslaved people would be considered US citizens.  The 14th Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”  Chemerinsky said that this has “always been understood to mean that all born in the United States (or naturalized as citizens) are United States citizens,” in addition to any individuals under US jurisdiction abroad, such as children born to US military personnel in foreign countries. The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was intended to exclude only Native Americans born on tribal land as well as children of enemy occupiers and foreign diplomats.  The Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark “makes clear that those born in the United States are citizens,” Chemerinsky added. That case concerned a child born in California to Chinese immigrants who were lawful permanent residents of the US. At the time, no Chinese citizens were allowed to become naturalized US citizens under the Chinese Exclusion Acts. The court ruled that the child was a US citizen because he was born in the US, even though his parents were noncitizens.  Can Trump ban birthright citizenship anyway? Right-wing immigration hawks have argued that the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause ought to be interpreted differently to exclude children of unauthorized immigrants from the benefits of automatic citizenship. The clause, they argue, was meant to exclude anyone who had any loyalties to a foreign power, including citizens of other countries.  But even some of Trump’s allies — including Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant think tank — appear to acknowledge that he would face an uphill battle in court to realize his plan.  “I think it would be immediately challenged in the courts, and I think that the challenge would have all of the history and the origins of the statute behind it,” Motomura said. “I can’t predict what any court will actually do, but I think the historical record is so clear.” Still, if Trump succeeds in enacting his executive order, its impact would be far-reaching. Birthright citizenship has served as an “engine of integration” for immigrant populations in the US, and ending it would also undermine America’s cultural identity as an “inclusive immigrant society,” Motomura said, adding that it would hit people of Mexican and Central American origin the hardest. “That aspect can’t be ignored,” Motomura said. “It’s the resurrection of the use of US citizenship rules with a real racial impact, and I think an intentional racial impact.”

A man pleaded guilty in the 2015 killings of a Georgia couple after a magnet fisher pulled in a rifle and other evidence linked to the case.

The research, conducted with 50 physicians last year, found that using ChatGPT did not significantly improve doctors’ diagnostic reasoning.

Veteran journalist Katie Couric said she was "frustrated" by Vice President Kamala Harris' "inability to really succinctly answer questions" following her election defeat.