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.Donald Trump is in his third week on trial in New York, where he faces 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. He’s accused of covering up a $130,000 hush-money payment made in 2016 to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who recently testified about her encounters with the former president. I spoke with Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham about where the case stands, Trump’s penchant for violating his gag order, and the bizarre nature of this trial.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The nudes internet Trump’s latest abortion position is more radical than it sounds. “Listen to what they’re chanting,” Judith Shulevitz writes. Like an Ordinary CitizenStephanie Bai: To start off, let’s lay the groundwork for this trial. Can you briefly explain the case that the prosecutors are trying to make?David A. Graham: People talk about this as “the hush-money case,” but paying hush money is not itself illegal. What prosecutors are arguing is that Trump paid Stormy Daniels in exchange for her not talking about their alleged sexual relationship, and then falsified the business records to cover up that payment. They say that this constituted election interference because the goal was to keep knowledge of the relationship from voters during the 2016 election.The prosecution needs to establish that Trump was deeply involved in the creation and the payment of this hush-money agreement, because the defense is trying to say that Trump may not have been aware of the situation. When the prosecution questions people who worked in accounting at the Trump Organization, for example, they are trying to show that Trump was deeply involved in payments, deeply involved in the minutiae of the business—so he obviously would have been aware of a payout as big as $130,000.Stephanie: What is Trump’s defense team’s counterargument?David: They don’t deny that this money was paid, but they say that he didn’t falsify the records. They’re also trying to impugn the honesty of some of the witnesses. They mostly seem to be trying to pick apart aspects of the prosecution’s case rather than offering some sort of counternarrative.Stephanie: If the prosecution isn’t able to successfully prove that Trump was aware of the hush-money agreement, what does that mean for their case?David: If they can’t prove that Trump was involved, or if Trump’s lawyers can plausibly argue that he did this simply to protect his reputation or to protect his marriage rather than to interfere with the election, then the prosecutors will have a harder time getting the jury to convict.Stephanie: In defending comments Trump made about the trial, his attorney Todd Blanche said that Trump had a right to complain about the “two systems of justice.” In some ways, it seems like the prosecution is arguing two cases: the hush-money case, and the case for this being a legitimate, fair trial—and not the “political witch hunt” that Trump has called it. Let’s say that Trump ends up getting convicted. Do you think his supporters will accept that outcome?David: It depends on what that means. There was a poll yesterday saying that most people expect Trump to be convicted, and that includes a plurality of Republicans. So in that sense, they see what’s coming. But I think there’s a widespread sentiment that either he’s being prosecuted by Democrats who are out to get him or that what he did wasn’t wrong. If anything, the trial seems to be solidifying support within his base.Stephanie: At the core of this case is the extramarital affair Trump allegedly had during his marriage to Melania. Have we heard anything from her during this trial?David: We have not! Trump has brought a rotating posse with him to court, including not just his lawyers but also his aides, his campaign manager, and his son Eric. Melania has not been there. He complained that he had to be in court on her birthday, which is a little ironic given the alleged events that led to the case.Stephanie: Headlines and pundits have called this a “historic” and “unprecedented” trial, because it’s the first time a former president has gone to trial for criminal charges. Has this case set any precedents for how a criminal trial of a former president would proceed?David: This is not a legal precedent, but it’s been powerful to watch Trump have to show up in court when he clearly doesn’t want to be there, listen to testimony he doesn’t want to listen to, sit in this courtroom with a bad HVAC system, and endure it like an ordinary citizen. Even if he argues that he is above the rule of law, we are seeing him sit there like anyone else.Stephanie: Does the gag order, which has been imposed on Trump and bars him from attacking people involved in the trial, set any sort of precedent for presidential trials going forward?David: The gag order comes from Trump’s habit of attacking witnesses, the family of prosecutors and judges. I don’t know that you would get one of these as a standard practice with presidents. But each time you have a defendant who has that kind of history or who starts doing that, there’s a good chance of the gag order. Still, Trump has been able to exploit the weirdness of this case and get away with things that other defendants would not have.Stephanie: Can you say a bit more about how he’s exploited the weirdness of the case?David: Anytime he gets in trouble for saying something, he says, Look, I’m a politician running for office. I have to be able to make political speeches. It’s unfair for me to be muzzled. That’s something that the judge has had to figure out: How do you write a gag order that allows Trump to be a candidate but protects the witnesses and the sanctity of the case?To me, it also looks like Trump is daring the judge to jail him—like he concluded that getting sent to jail for a night or a weekend would actually help him politically. So the judge has to decide how much he protects the sanctity of the system by enforcing the gag order versus giving Trump an opportunity to undermine the system in an even bigger way by claiming political persecution.Stephanie: You wrote earlier this week that some of the best-sourced reporters in the courtroom are saying that Trump largely wants to avoid jail time. Is this a situation where Trump can spin either option in his favor?David: I think it’s very “heads I win, tails you lose.” If the judge lets him get away with it, he can talk all kinds of trash about the proceeding, and that’s a win for him because he wants to undermine the trial for political reasons. If he gets thrown in jail, I’m sure he would hate it, but it also gives him another political talking point.Stephanie: It seems like a very tight line for Judge Juan Merchan to walk.David: It’s really challenging. Every judge Trump has recently come before has had to deal with this in some way or another. They’re trying to figure out: How do we keep him in line without that becoming the story? They want the focus to be on the facts of the case. And that’s really hard to achieve with Trump, because he doesn’t want the focus to be on the facts.Related: The Stormy Daniels testimony spotlights Trump’s misogyny. Judge Merchan is out of good options. Today’s News Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said that President Joe Biden’s decision to pause weapons shipments to Israel was related to Israel’s plans to move forward with a large-scale offensive operation in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. An appeals court in Georgia agreed to review the ruling that allowed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to stay on the election-interference case against Trump after it was revealed that she had a romantic relationship with a prosecutor on her team. The New York Times reported that in a 2012 deposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that a doctor told him that his memory loss and mental fogginess could be due to a worm in his brain that “ate a portion of it and then died.” Dispatches Work in Progress: No one knows what universities are for, Derek Thompson writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by Vartika Sharma for The Atlantic Ozempic or BustBy Daniel Engber In the early spring of 2020, Barb Herrera taped a signed note to a wall of her bedroom in Orlando, Florida, just above her pillow. Notice to EMS! it said. No vent! No intubation! She’d heard that hospitals were overflowing, and that doctors were being forced to choose which COVID patients they would try to save and which to abandon. She wanted to spare them the trouble. Barb was nearly 60 years old, and weighed about 400 pounds. She has type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and a host of other health concerns. At the start of the pandemic, she figured she was doomed. When she sent her list of passwords to her kids, who all live far away, they couldn’t help but think the same. “I was in an incredibly dark place,” she told me. “I would have died.” Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Taxpayers are about to subsidize a lot more sports stadiums. The absurdity of believing China’s great at protecting kids online Culture Break Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Teenie Harris Archive / Carnegie Museum of Art; Getty. Read. “When Nan Goldin Danced in Low-Life Go-Go Bars in Paterson, N.J.,” a poem by Rosa Alcalá:“While men fed her tips and she tucked them into her bikini, / a fist hit an eye in a house in Paterson, like a flash going off / in a dark kitchen. And in the corner, a girl stood watching.”Revisit an iconic photo. American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson, a book about Gordon Parks’s widely celebrated 1942 portrait of the government worker Ella Watson.Play our daily crossword.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Here is a nonexhaustive list of objects Apple recently pulverized with a menacing hydraulic crusher: a trumpet, a piano, a turntable, a sculpted bust, lots and lots of paint, video-game controllers.These are all shown being demolished in the company’s new iPad commercial, a minute-long spot titled “Crush!” The items are arranged on a platform beneath a slowly descending enormous metal block, then trash-compactored out of existence in a violent symphony of crunching. Once the destruction is complete, the press lifts back up to reveal that the items have been replaced by a slender, shimmering iPad.The notion behind the commercial is fairly obvious. Apple wants to show you that the bulk of human ingenuity and history can be compressed into an iPad, and thereby wants you to believe that the device is a desirable entry point to both the consumption of culture and the creation of it. (The ad is for the latest “Pro” model of the iPad, the price of which starts at $999 and goes as high as $2,299, depending on its configuration.) Most important, it wants you to know that the iPad is powerful and quite thin.But good lord, Apple, read the room. In its swing for spectacle, the ad lacks so much self-awareness, it’s cringey, even depressing. This is May 2024: Humanity is in the early stages of a standoff with generative AI, which offers methods through which visual art, writing, music, and computer code can be created by a machine in seconds with the simplest of prompts. Apple is reportedly building its own large language model for its devices, and its CEO, Tim Cook, explicitly invoked AI in his comments about the new tablet: The iPad Pro features, he said, an “outrageously powerful chip for AI.” Most of us are still in the sizing-up phase for generative AI, staring warily at a technology that’s been hyped as world-changing and job-disrupting (even, some proponents argue, potentially civilization-ending), and been foisted on the public in a very short period of time. It’s a weird, exhausting, exciting, even tense moment. Enter: THE CRUSHER.Apple is very good at defining the zeitgeist as it relates to how humans use technology to interact with the world. Announced with a Super Bowl commercial in 1984, the Macintosh ushered in the era of personal computing by presenting streamlined hardware and a pleasant graphical interface; iTunes and the iPod augured a world of limitless media; and the iPhone delivered on its promise to fit the entire universe in our pocket. There is about a 0 percent chance that the company did not understand the optics of releasing this ad at this moment. Apple is among the most sophisticated and moneyed corporations in all the world. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)But this time, it’s hard to like what the company is showing us. People are angry. One commenter on X called the ad “heartbreaking.” Three reasons could explain why. First: Although watching things explode might be fun, it’s less fun when a multitrillion-dollar tech corporation is the one destroying tools, instruments, and other objects of human expression and creativity. Second, of course, is that this is a moment of great technological upheaval and angst, especially among artists, as tech companies build models trained off of creative work with an ultimate goal of simulating those very peoples’ skilled output. It is easy to be offended at the ad’s implication, and it is easy to be aghast at the idea that AI will wipe out human creativity with cheap synthetic waste.[Read: These 183,000 books are fueling the biggest fight in publishing and tech]The third-order annoyance is in the genre. Apple has, essentially, aped a popular format of “crushing” videos on TikTok, wherein hydraulic presses are employed to obliterate everyday objects for the pleasure of idle scrollers. Arguably the company thought that copying this specific motif would be fun, but something is grim about Apple trying to draft off a viral-video format to sell units. It’s unclear whether some of the ad might have been created with CGI, but Apple could easily round up tens of thousands of dollars of expensive equipment and destroy it all on a whim. However small, the ad is a symbol of the company’s dominance.The ad remains, in some sense, great marketing. Everyone is talking about the iPad, a mainstay in Apple’s lineup that nonetheless gets far less attention than the iPhone. But this sudden interest offers room for a genuine appraisal of the device 14 years after its release. The iPad was one of Steve Jobs’s final products, one he believed could become as popular and perhaps as transformative as cars. That vision hasn’t panned out. The iPad hasn’t killed books, televisions, or even the iPhone. The commercial hails the new Pro model as “the most powerful iPad ever,” but its bravado is mostly unearned. The iPad is, potentially, a creative tool. It’s also an expensive luxury device whose cheaper iterations, at least, are vessels for letting your kid watch Cocomelon so they don’t melt down in public, reading self-help books on a plane, or opting for more pixels and better resolution whilst consuming content on the toilet.In the day and a half since the ad was released, people have only gotten angrier. Cook’s tweet featuring the commercial has been viewed more than 29 million times, and the unhappy responses are piling up. Odds are, people aren’t really furious at Apple on behalf of the trumpeters—they’re mad because the ad says something about the balance of power. Apple is a great technology company, but it is a legendary marketer. Its ads, slickly produced keynotes, and even its retail stores succeed because they offer a vision of the company’s products as tools that give us, the consumers, power. The fundamental flaw of Apple’s commercial is that it is a display of force that reminds us of this sleight of hand. We are not the powerful entity in this relationship. The creative potential we feel when we pick up one of their shiny devices is actually on loan. At the end of the day, it belongs to Apple, the destroyer.

Scapegoating is one of humankind’s primal rituals, dating back to the Book of Leviticus, in which God commanded the prophet Aaron to lay hands on a goat, confess the sins of his tribe, and then send the animal into the desert. Throughout centuries and across cultures, the historian René Girard once argued, warring factions have settled disputes by agreeing upon a figure to collectively blame—a resolution that is ugly and unfair but, more than anything, cathartic.Perhaps this tradition helps explain what’s been so satisfying about watching two of the 21st century’s most important musicians, Drake and Kendrick Lamar, try to destroy each other. The rap feud that has engulfed public attention in recent weeks has been litigated in breathtaking, twisty-turny songs packed with very 2020s references—to Ozempic, disinformation, AI, Taylor Swift, and elite pedophile rings. These two superstars have leveled accusations so nasty that cancellation, today’s standard punishment for celebrity wrongdoing, hardly seems sufficient. Thus far, the consensus is that Lamar has “won” the war—but in that case, Drake’s defeat is really what’s significant. We’re witnessing the modern implementation of an ancient rite, the desecration of an individual for the moral cleansing of the masses.The conflict was sparked by what now seems like a quaint dispute: Who’s the greatest rapper? A verse by J. Cole on a Drake song last fall postulated himself, Drake, and Lamar as hip-hop’s “big three.” Earlier this year, Lamar replied with a correction: “It’s just big me,” he rapped in a tone of seething hostility. Cole issued and quickly retracted a reply, but Drake took Lamar’s bait, and the two men began volleying diss tracks. Over eight songs—plus one interlude!—in less than a month, the question of who’s a better rapper has given way to a more profound debate about hip-hop, masculinity, and nothing less than the nature of evil.Beef is older than rap, but this showdown is new in its scale and velocity. When Jay-Z and Nas scrapped in the early 2000s, they did so at a time when rap was not quite yet synonymous with pop. But in today’s fractured musical ecosystem, the 37-year-old Drake, who has had 13 No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, and the 36-year-old Lamar, the only rapper to ever win a Pulitzer, have achieved a rare level of name recognition. The most consequential rap beef ever, between Biggie and Tupac, simmered for months and unfolded via physical releases, local radio, and in-person dustups. By contrast, Drake and Lamar are using fast-twitch digital technologies to record tracks at whim, circulate them around the planet instantly, and feed a teeming ecosystem of commentators, remixers, fans, haters, and voyeurs.This global audience has long been primed for the showdown. Since the early 2010s, Drake and Lamar have reigned as the yin and yang of popular rap: the entertainer and the artist, the hedonist and the monk. Drake has flooded the marketplace with hits, collaborations, and tie-in products. His sound is chameleonic, borrowing unapologetically from far-flung subgenres and scenes, and his lyrical outlook is pettily, proudly self-interested. Lamar, by contrast, expresses himself in carefully honed albums exploring how to live ethically in a fallen world. The Compton native’s music, for all its experimental edge, roots itself in the bounce and attitude of West Coast hip-hop. These two men have long been in a cold war, trading covert lyrical insults that fit with the ideological and aesthetic clash they both seem to represent.So when Lamar rapped, “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress” on last week’s diss track “Euphoria,” he was harvesting from richly tilled soil. The hatred he spoke of was both visceral and intellectual; the song argued that the mixed-race Drake was insufficiently Black, or at least exploitative and cringey in his performance of Blackness. “It’s not just me,” Lamar rapped, referring to his distaste for Drake and the people he surrounds himself with. “I’m what the culture feelin’.” He was, by this logic, unleashing the pent-up resentment of true rap fans against a man he later labeled a “colonizer.”Others can debate Lamar’s racial claims, but on some level the attack represents a desperate wish: for Drake, along with all he represents, to be cleanly excised from modern hip-hop culture. The maddening truth for Drake’s critics is that he, in a fundamental way, is modern hip-hop culture—the genre’s sound and social cachet over the past 15 years are inextricable from his success. On the diss track “Not Like Us,” Lamar rapped a list of well-respected artists such as 21 Savage and Young Thug who have lent Drake “false street cred.” This attack cut Drake, but it also called attention to how many rappers have mingled their brands with his. Even for Lamar, the relationship between realness and commercialism isn’t neat: As Drake pointed out in his own diss tracks, Lamar has worked with Maroon 5, Swift, and Drake himself.[Read: How the Pulitzers chose Kendrick Lamar, according to a juror]As the feud between the men escalated, a more explosive issue came to the fore: Which of these men is worse to women and children? Lamar’s attacks were blunt, labeling Drake a deadbeat father and a “predator.” He addressed pitying verses to Drake’s young son (whose existence was first publicized in a 2018 diss track by Drake’s rival Pusha T) and to an 11-year-old daughter, whom Drake allegedly has been keeping secret. He also said that Drake leads a crew of “certified pedophiles” that is systematically luring “victims all inside of they home.” Drake, meanwhile, has called attention to rumors that Lamar beat the mother of his child.None of these claims is verifiable. Drake has denied Lamar’s accusations: “Just for clarity, I feel disgusted, I’m too respected / If I was fucking young girls, I promise I’d have been arrested,” he rapped on “The Heart Part 6.” He also claimed that his camp intentionally leaked the lie that Drake was hiding a daughter in order to cause confusion. As for the claim that Lamar committed domestic violence, the rapper denied it years ago in a radio interview—and, in his recent diss tracks, repeatedly (albeit vaguely) said that Drake is lying about Lamar’s family.Truth, however, doesn’t really matter in this battle. The PR narrative is clear-cut, classic, and irresistible. People like Drake are “not like us,” as Lamar put it in a track that will have listeners singing along and dancing to lyrics about child trafficking all summer. Lamar has spun a populist narrative in which cultural elites are vampiric abusers from whom regular folks need to hide their daughters. The power of that kind of rhetoric has been well demonstrated in national politics—and has crowd-pleasing appeal at a time when hip-hop titans such as Diddy are facing legal trouble in connection with alleged sex crimes (allegations that he denies). It is easier to say “not like us” than to dwell on the reality that predation happens everywhere in American life, in unfamous communities, workplaces, and homes.Drake has turned in some of the best rapping of his career over the past few weeks, but the substance of his disses isn’t landing. Many of his attacks draw from Lamar’s own catalog—which is all about how society’s moral corruption is perpetuated not by far-off villains but by our own selves. Lamar’s most recent album, 2022’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, told of his own infidelity, brutality, misogyny, pride, and a bucket of other sins. Drake’s lyrics have invoked those admissions to show that Lamar isn’t a saint, but the problem with this logic is not simply that Lamar has already confessed. It’s that Drake, the more popular artist, is just a more appealing vessel upon which to project communal shame.Indeed, Drake’s shunning has been a group activity. The feud really kicked off in March when Drake’s frequent collaborators Future and Metro Boomin released two albums full of Drake disses. (The first album featured Lamar’s “it’s just big me” verse.) Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky, and Kanye West have jumped in with their own digs. Each of these figures has his own reasons for beef, but the gist of their attacks has been tonally similar, laced with disgust. Most hilariously—and tellingly—Metro Boomin made a beat with a sped-up chorus about Drake’s alleged plastic surgery, and invited anyone to remix it. Amateurs on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms have used that beat to recap the very same talking points that Lamar has been using.“This shit was some good exercise,” Drake muttered, resignedly, in his most recent salvo. If he now retreats from the spotlight for a period, what has been accomplished? Lamar has proved himself to be an even savvier operator than once thought, and the breakneck rudeness of “Euphoria,” “Not Like Us,” and Drake’s “Family Matters” are going to remain a guilty thrill to listen to—but the meat of the dispute between these rappers has hardly been addressed. Surely misogyny and abuse will not disappear from society. Hip-hop probably won’t revert to some purer, more righteous form of itself. Some people may even use this war of words to try to perpetuate the bloodiest tendencies of the genre’s history; yesterday, a drive-by shooter injured one of Drake’s bodyguards, for as-yet-unknown reasons.The most likely legacy of this battle will be in accelerating the record industry’s strategic use of gossip and metanarrative. Music was once a social, local art form that fostered cultural cohesion; now it’s an on-demand utility that insulates people in their headphones. Commanding mass attention in this era is a difficult task, but the artists who are able to do so—Drake and Lamar, yes, as well as storytellers such as Swift and Olivia Rodrigo—make the internet feel like a village from our distant past. We can send strangers into the desert and feel some absolution, whether we’ve earned it or not.

For more than a week now, torrential rainfall in Brazil’s southern state of Rio Grande do Sul has swollen rivers, triggered landslides, and caused widespread flooding. More than 90 deaths have been blamed on the flooding, with another 130 people listed as missing. Rescue efforts continue across the state and in the hard-hit city of Porto Alegre. The intense rains have abated for the moment, but flooding rivers continue to rise downstream, forcing thousands to seek shelter and assistance.To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.

Over the past week, I’ve spent several hours scrolling through Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok also owned by ByteDance. Both apps are governed by a central algorithm that recommends videos to users based on their interests and behavior. Here is what I saw one morning in the order it was fed to me: a video of an influencer wearing glittery thigh-high stockings posing for a photo shoot, a livestream broadcast of a girl who appeared to be using editing software that made her breasts look comically enormous, a clip from a samurai-themed video game, a day in the life vlog of a single woman living in Tokyo, and a video of a boxing match between two attractive women wearing sports bras.The content I watched on Douyin was often maximized for shock value, but it was also frequently funny or insightful. In other words, it largely mirrored what can be found on the American version of TikTok, although notably, I didn’t see political videos or criticism of the Chinese government. What was readily apparent is that Douyin is not the sanitized utopia that some commentators have described. “In China, TikTok has a comparable product that promotes educational videos on math & science to kids. In America, they’re promoting videos on eating Tide Pods,” Republican Senator Ted Cruz wrote on X in March. “China’s version of TikTok celebrates academic achievements, athletic achievements, it’s all science projects,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast in 2022. The venture capitalist Vinod Khosla called TikTok “programmable fentanyl,” while Douyin, he said, amounted to “spinach for Chinese kids.”These comparisons are grossly exaggerated, and the truth is that kids in China regularly view content on Douyin that may be dangerous or harmful, just as kids around the world do on TikTok and every other large internet platform. But there’s something more perplexing—and, frankly, alarming—about this line of thinking, and the extent to which people have begun to imply that Americans can learn lessons from how the internet is regulated in China, where an oppressive regime regularly blocks foreign-owned apps and censors what information citizens can access on the internet.“China is much more thoughtful and protective of its young people” when it comes to social media, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said at an event earlier this year. “The fact that China has been far more effective in protecting its children from the excesses of technology should make western legislators think,” the British journalist Camilla Cavendish wrote in the Financial Times around the same time, adding, “We are hardly going to win the battle with China over artificial intelligence, or anything else, if we raise a generation of zombies.”What rarely gets mentioned in these discussions, however, is the fact that the Chinese government has built the most comprehensive digital surveillance system in the world, which it primarily uses not to protect children, but to squash any form of dissent that may threaten the power of the Chinese Communist Party. “Everybody exists in a censored environment, and so what gets censored for kids is just one step on top of what gets censored for adults,” Jeremy Daum, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and the founder of the site China Law Translate, told me.[Read: America lost the plot with TikTok]It should set off warning bells for Americans that many states have explored legislation limiting internet access for minors in ways that mirror what China has done. Last week, the Supreme Court refused to block a controversial law in Texas that would require pornography sites to verify a user’s age with a government-issued ID or other means before they access sexually explicit content. At least half a dozen states have passed similar age-verification laws recently. Related bills—governing not just pornography, but also basic access to social media—are pending in some 30 different states and Puerto Rico, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Although creating obstacles to prevent children from stumbling upon sexual material or signing up for TikTok without their parents’ consent may seem justifiable, the courts have held for decades that forcing adults to verify their age puts an undue burden on the right to access constitutionally protected speech online. Before, we might have expected the Supreme Court to recognize the First Amendment issues at hand and “affirm its previous position that the speech rights of adults outweigh the potential harms to minors,” the journalist Casey Newton recently wrote. “But it’s not clear that we can do so any longer.”China, however, doesn’t have free-speech concerns, and has spent the past 20 years building and iterating on an elaborate system for confirming the name and age of every internet user, slowly chipping away at the ability to remain anonymous online. The real-name-registration system in the country requires companies to verify the identity of each person who signs up to use a social-media platform or discussion forum. People also need to show a form of identification to purchase a new SIM card, which allows the Chinese government to try to keep track of who is connected to every phone number. Unlike in the U.S., you can’t just walk into a Walgreens in China and pick up an anonymous burner phone. “There is a structural way to verify age that has been embedded in the system for a long time,” Kendra Schaefer, a partner at the research firm Trivium China, told me. “That technical foundation doesn’t exist here.”The urge to figure out how to protect young people online is, of course, understandable. Many experts worry that children are experiencing profoundly negative side effects from social media, and much of what China has done in this area is part of a sincere attempt to address the same concerns shared by parents everywhere. In this light, it’s tempting to argue that America could also reasonably trade everyone’s digital privacy in exchange for keeping kids safe. But we can look at what has happened in China and see the obvious problem with that logic: It would trap the U.S. in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.Four years ago, Beijing started cracking down on video-game companies, and it now prohibits kids from gaming for more than just three hours most weeks—one hour each on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. But roughly a year after the rules were put in place, nearly a third of youth gamers in China readily admitted that they were still playing for more than three hours each week, including outside the approved time slots, according to a survey by the market-research firm Niko Partners. The findings reflect what any parent already knows to be true: Teenagers figure out how to break the rules.[Read: Welcome to the TikTok meltdown]One work-around they relied on is buying SIM cards on the illegal black market that were already linked to the identity of an adult, or they simply got their parents or older siblings to sign in for them. These loopholes prompted major game publishers like Tencent to build stringent facial-recognition systems that could be used to root out underage users. In 2022, Tencent announced that people 55 and older would need to scan their face before playing popular mobile games at night to ensure that their grandchildren weren’t using their phones. Why would the U.S. want to go down a path that has resulted in the need for grandmas to pass a facial-recognition test before they can play Candy Crush?But critics of TikTok are probably right in saying that educational content is more popular on the Chinese version of the app, though not necessarily because of anything ByteDance has done. Rui Ma, the founder of the technology-investment consulting firm Tech Buzz China, told me that Western commentators often fail to appreciate how intense the culture around academic achievement is in China and the ways that is reflected on social media. Kids who are put under enormous pressure to get good grades, in other words, might be more interested in videos related to studying than their American peers.“The entire system is already set up to support studying over play, and yet, it is still a very difficult problem for parents to get their kids to stop playing video games and wasting time on the phone,” Ma said. On that count, at least, China and the U.S. see eye to eye.

The internet may be, as the 2003 musical Avenue Q put it, constructed for pornography, but the website formerly known as Twitter has become overwhelmed by it. Almost any tweet, no matter how anodyne, generates replies that say “NUDES IN BIO” or feature actual pornography. I tweeted recently about the History Channel series Alone, a reality-television show in which people are left to their own devices and occasionally ward off bears, and among the responses was a spam image that displayed the entirety of one (extremely flexible) woman’s genitalia.The constant and absolutely unavoidable nudes on X are partially the product of a spam operation, the purpose of which appears to be, as with any spam operation on the internet, to eventually separate some poor user from their money. But they also perfectly embody what I call the nudes internet: a space in which everything—every ad, meme, and argument—is reduced to sex. Not actual sexual intercourse, mind you. Not even the omnipresent “NUDES IN BIO” spam ads promise that you, the humble clicker upon the ad, will actually get to have sex with the woman in the picture. Rather, on the nudes internet, sex means power and worth, and the goal is to accumulate it, for no reason but to have it, like an expensive couch that is impossible to sit on. Thus, the procurement of sex, the display of sex, sex as a competitive market place, sex as an economic vehicle, sex as a cure-all, sex as a moral cudgel—the nudes internet is less about sex itself and more about what it symbolizes.[From the December 2018 issue: Why are young people having so little sex?]The problem with the nudes internet is not actually the nudes in my mentions, even though the nudes are incredibly, unspeakably irritating—if I tweet about the NFL or the Bible, my greatest wish is not to see AI-generated labia in the responses. Rather, the problem is the sexualization of absolutely everything that takes place within the nudes internet, which is now leaking out into the broader internet. You can find it in the comments section on an innocuous Instagram post or YouTube video. You can find it in the diatribes of conservative commentators furious that college students aren’t sexy anymore, or that teens aren’t having sex in the backseat of cars anymore. Or in the left-leaning publications that firmly believe we'd all be hornier if we just had sexier movie stars and mitigated the intervention of the market.Where did this all come from? Interest in sex—even crass public discussion of sex—is hardly novel. I grew up in the 1990s, when the Clinton impeachment scandal, lad mags, girl power, and evangelical purity culture combined to create an environment in which female sexual availability was simultaneously desired and disgusting. But the nudes internet is different. As culture has moved online, the entrance fee for all kinds of cultural activity has become a kind of performance—not actually having sex, but it is imperative looking like, and sounding like, you could.Over the past decade, three big changes in internet culture have had a particularly big impact. The first is the rise of OnlyFans. In 2016, the British entrepreneur Timothy Stokely launched the platform that connects creators of content (including sexual content) to people willing to pay to see it and occasionally interact with the creator. While some content creators on OnlyFans are YouTubers, sports figures, and influencers, many do create sexual content for their subscribers. The platform rewarded those content creators for commercializing their social-media interactions—and because they could be literally anyone, brought the marketing of sex into more mainstream spaces.The second is also driven by a flourishing internet subculture that builds on old-school pickup artists. Pickup artistry gamifies getting women (referred to as “targets”) to sleep with men (referred to as “closing”). Eric Weber’s How to Pick Up Girls! was published in 1971. But a new breed of social-media influencer has discovered that peddling such advice can be extremely lucrative. They tell their followers that having sex with women is among life’s primary purposes, and that women themselves are easily manipulated at best and duplicitous schemers at worst. The object is not the sex but the pursuit and the outward performance of sex, getting to be viewed as the man who has sex with as many women as possible.The pickup artists selling programs for men looking to have casual sex have developed a distinctive language: 5s and 6s or “mid” to refer to women whose appearance is passable (to them), Chads and Staceys to refer to the idealized, largely imaginary men and the women those idealized men are purportedly privileged to sleep with, and the popular “304” (the digits typed into a calculator then viewed upside down look like the word hoe) to describe any woman, doing anything, anywhere, ever.The third and most recent change is Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. He made changes to the platform so that virality paid actual money to users willing to purchase a blue check mark. Nothing goes viral faster than something about sex. As other users began to adopt the language of OnlyFans creators and pickup-artist influencers, the nudes internet reached escape velocity.[Read: The ugly honesty of Elon Musk’s Twitter rebrand]No one is sexually freer or more sexually satisfied because everyone online is yelling about how the breasts of a young actress ended “wokeness.” Instead, sexiness has become yet another role that people online, and even offline, must perform. The internet is a place awash in the idea of sex as a scourge, goal, and a thing you Absolutely Must Get or Else You Are Worthless (unless you happen to be a young woman, in which case you must appear to be sexually desirable but ideally never have sex, but not seem like you never have sex, lest you appear “frigid”). Everyone should be hot enough for you to want to have sex with them, and everything—people, products, movies—should be sexy. None of this facilitates the having of actual sex by actual human beings; instead, the nudes internet is built on the belief that being sexy, or more important, being seen as sexy, is just how you keep score in life.The cure for the nudes internet is to emphasize an alternative—an internet in which the pursuit and performance of sex and sexiness is not the primary purpose of being alive. As a young woman told a Los Angeles Times reporter who was writing about why Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations, “Maybe you don’t have to have sex all the time. Maybe if you’re doing other things in your life, and you’ve got other priorities, or you just don’t feel like it, that can be a good enough answer.”

Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. “Happily, there is a simple solution,” Smith wrote in a droll Washington Post column. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, his modest proposal called to get rid of all faculty and students at Pomona so that the college could fulfill its destiny as an institution run by and for nonteaching bureaucrats. At the very least, he said, “the elimination of professors and students would greatly improve most colleges’ financial position.”Administrative growth isn’t unique to Pomona. In 2014, the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, in which he bemoaned the multi-decade expansion of “administrative blight.” From the early 1990s to 2009, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. Although administrative positions grew especially quickly at private universities and colleges, public institutions are not immune to the phenomenon. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent from 2004 to 2014. How and why did this happen? Some of this growth reflects benign, and perhaps positive, changes to U.S. higher education. More students are applying to college today, and their needs are more diverse than those of previous classes. Today’s students have more documented mental-health challenges. They take out more student loans. Expanded college-sports participation requires more athletic staff. Increased federal regulations require new departments, such as disability offices and quasi-legal investigation teams for sexual-assault complaints. As the modern college has become more complex and multifarious, there are simply more jobs to do. And the need to raise money to pay for those jobs requires larger advancement and alumni-relations offices—meaning even more administration. But many of these jobs have a reputation for producing little outside of meeting invites. “I often ask myself, What do these people actually do?,” Ginsberg told me last week. “I think they spend much of their day living in an alternate universe called Meeting World. I think if you took every third person with vice associate or assistant in their title, and they disappeared, nobody would notice.”In an email to me, Smith, the Pomona economist, said the biggest factor driving the growth of college admin was a phenomenon he called empire building. Administrators are emotionally and financially rewarded if they can hire more people beneath them, and those administrators, in time, will want to increase their own status by hiring more people underneath them. Before long, a human pyramid of bureaucrats has formed to take on jobs of dubious utility. And this can lead to an explosion of new mandates that push the broader institution toward confusion and incoherence.The world has more pressing issues than overstaffing at America’s colleges. But it’s nonetheless a real problem that could be a factor in rising college costs. After all, higher education is a labor-intensive industry in which worker compensation is driving inflation, and for much of the 21st century, compensation costs grew fastest among noninstructional professional positions. Some of these job cuts could result in lower graduation rates or reduced quality of life on campus. Many others might go unnoticed by students and faculty. In the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber drew on his experience as a college professor to excoriate college admin jobs that were “so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Another reason to care about the growth of university bureaucracy is that it siphons power away from instructors and researchers at institutions that are—theoretically—dedicated to instruction and research. In the past few decades, many schools have hired more part-time faculty, including adjunct professors, to keep up with teaching demands, while their full-time-staff hires have disproportionately been for administration positions. As universities shift their resources toward admin, they don’t just create resentment among faculty; they may constrict the faculty’s academic freedom.“Take something like diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Ginsberg said. “Many colleges who adopt DEI principles have left-liberal faculty who, of course, are in favor of the principles of DEI, in theory,” he said. But the logic of a bureaucracy is to take any mission and grow its power indefinitely, whether or not such growth serves the underlying institution. “Before long, many schools create provosts for diversity, and for equity, and for inclusion. These provosts hold lots of meetings. They create a set of principles. They tell faculty to update their syllabi to be consistent with new principles devised in those meetings. And so, before long, you’ve built an administrative body that is directly intruding on the core function of teaching.”Bureaucratic growth has a shadow self: mandate inflation. More college bureaucrats lead to new mandates for the organization, such as developing new technology in tech-transfer offices, advancing diversity in humanities classes through DEI offices, and ensuring inclusive living standards through student-affairs offices. As these missions become more important to the organization, they require more hires. Over time, new hires may request more responsibility and create new subgroups, which create even more mandates. Before long, a once-focused organization becomes anything but.In sociology, this sort of muddle has a name. It is goal ambiguity—a state of confusion, or conflicting expectations, for what an organization should do or be. The modern university now has so many different jobs to do that it can be hard to tell what its priorities are, Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at UCLA, told me. “For example, what is UCLA’s mission?” he said. “Research? Undergraduate teaching? Graduate teaching? Health care? Patents? Development? For a slightly simpler question, what about individual faculty? When I get back to my office, what should I spend my time on: my next article, editing my lecture notes, doing a peer review, doing service, or advancing diversity? Who knows.”Goal ambiguity might be a natural by-product of modern institutions trying to be everything to everyone. But eventually, they’ll pay the price. Any institution that finds itself promoting a thousand priorities at once may find it difficult to promote any one of them effectively. In a crisis, goal ambiguity may look like fecklessness or hypocrisy.[George Packer: The campus-left occupation that broke higher education]For example, in the past few years, many elite colleges and universities have cast themselves as “anti-racist” and “decolonial” enterprises that hire “scholar activists” as instructors and publish commentary on news controversies, as if they were editorial boards that happened to collect tuition. This rebranding has set schools up for failure as they navigate the Gaza-war protests. When former Harvard President Claudine Gay declined to tell Congress that calls for Jewish genocide were automatic violations of the school’s rules of harassment, she might not have caused a stir—if Harvard had a reputation for accommodating even radical examples of political speech. But Gay’s statements stood in lurid contrast to the university’s unambiguous condemnation of students and professors who had offended other minority groups. This apparent hypocrisy was goal ambiguity collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions: one mandate to police offensive speech versus another mandate to allow activist groups to speak offensively.Confronted with the Gaza-war protests, colleges are again struggling to balance competing priorities: free speech, the safety of students and staff, and basic school functions, such as the ability to walk to a lecture hall. That would be hard enough if they hadn’t sent the message to students that protesting was an integral part of the university experience. As Tyler Austin Harper wrote in The Atlantic, university administrators have spent years “recruiting social-justice-minded students and faculty to their campuses under the implicit, and often explicit, promise that activism is not just welcome but encouraged.” But once these administrators got exactly what they asked for—a campus-wide display of social-justice activism—they realized that aesthetic rebelliousness and actual rebellion don’t mix well, in their opinion. So they called the cops.Complex organizations need to do a lot of different jobs to appease their various stakeholders, and they need to hire people to do those jobs. But there is a value to institutional focus, and the past few months have shown just how destabilizing it is for colleges and universities to not have a clear sense of their priorities or be able to make those priorities transparent to faculty, students, donors, and the broader world. The ultimate problem isn’t just that too many administrators can make college expensive. It’s that too many administrative functions can make college institutionally incoherent.

Open a map of the United States. Select a big city at random. Chances are, it has recently approved or is on the verge of approving a lavish, taxpayer-funded stadium project for one or more of its local sports teams. This is true in Las Vegas, where the team currently known as the Oakland Athletics will soon be playing in a new ballpark up the street from the home of the NFL’s Raiders, also formerly of Oakland. Combined, the two stadiums will end up receiving more than $1.1 billion in public funding, not counting tax breaks. Something similar is happening in Chicago, where Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the White Sox, wants roughly $1 billion in public funding for a new stadium in the South Loop, while the Halas-McCaskey family, which owns the Bears, is requesting $2.4 billion for a new football stadium on the lakefront. Likewise in Cleveland, which has one of the nation’s highest childhood poverty rates, as well as in Phoenix, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. In Buffalo, the Bills recently received $850 million for new digs, and in Nashville, politicians approved a record $1.26 billion subsidy for the Titans.Economic research is unequivocal: These subsidies are a boondoggle for taxpayers, who have spent nearly $30 billion on stadiums over the past 34 years, not counting property-tax exemptions or federal revenues lost to tax-exempt municipal bonds. Stadiums do not come close to generating enough economic activity to pay back the public investment involved in building them—especially when they’re coupled with lease agreements that funnel revenue back to owners or allow teams to play in the stadiums rent-free. Even as an investment in your city’s stores of community spirit, stadium subsidies at this price are hard to justify. As the economist J. C. Bradbury told the Associated Press, “When you ask economists if we should fund sports stadiums, they can’t say ‘no’ fast enough.”[Read: Sports stadiums are a bad deal for cities]You would think that three decades’ worth of evidence would be enough to put an end to the practice of subsidizing sports stadiums. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. America finds itself on the brink of the biggest, most expensive publicly-funded-stadium boom ever, and the results will not be any better this time around.Until the 1980s, super-rich sports franchise owners generally did not seek or receive extravagant public subsidies. Three events changed that. First, in 1982, Al Davis, the Raiders’ owner, left Oakland for Los Angeles because officials refused to fund renovations to the Oakland Coliseum, which the city had built in the ’60s. (They would later cave on this; the Raiders returned to Oakland in 1995, lured by public funds.) Second, in 1984, Robert Irsay, the owner of the Baltimore Colts, moved the team to Indiana after being offered a sweetheart deal at the publicly funded Hoosier Dome. Finally, a few years later, Maryland approved hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding—along with a historically lopsided lease agreement—for a new stadium for the Orioles, now Baltimore’s only remaining team. “If you want to save the Orioles,” Maryland House Speaker R. Clayton Mitchell said at the time, “you have to give them this kind of lease.”Camden Yards turned out to be beautiful—a downtown shrine of hand-laid brick and cast-iron gates that evoked the odd-angled “Golden Age” of American ballpark design. Major League Baseball, sportswriters, and obliging local politicians were also quick to credit Camden Yards with spurring a revival of Baltimore’s downtown—and, with it, of inspired downtowns elsewhere. “No longer would communities across America build stadiums devoid of character,” Major League Baseball mythologized in a press release celebrating the park’s 30th anniversary, “but instead would build them to flow seamlessly in existing and historic neighborhoods, playing key roles in the revitalization of urban America.” This turned out to be a trap; now politicians could convince themselves that capitulating to team owners was sound public policy. Never mind that, in Baltimore’s case, Camden ultimately didn’t do all that much reviving. (The neighborhoods surrounding Camden Yards actually shed employers in the decades after the park opened, while unemployment and crime rose, according to Bloomberg.) Owners have made the idea central to the way they sell stadium projects ever since.In the early ’90s, for example, boosters pitched Cleveland’s Jacobs Field in a newspaper ad that promised “$33.7 million in public revenues every year” along with “28,000 good-paying jobs for the jobless” and “$15 million a year for schools for our children.” Now, here’s how Dave Kaval, president of the Oakland A’s, described the benefits of the $855 million subsidy that the A’s were trying to extract from Oakland, in 2021, before the team decided to relocate to Las Vegas: “Seven billion dollars in economic impact. 6,000 permanent and mostly union jobs. 3,000 construction jobs. We’re building more than a ballpark here.”[Read: Stadiums have gotten downright dystopian]Stadiums don’t actually do these things. The jobs they create are seasonal and low-wage. They tend not to increase commercial property values or encourage much in the way of economic activity, besides a bit of increased spending in bars and restaurants surrounding the venue—which is mostly being substituted for dollars that were previously being spent elsewhere. Tax revenues attributable to stadiums fall well short of recouping the public’s investment. Economically speaking, stadium subsidies mostly just transfer wealth from taxpayers to the owners of sports franchises.This became clear to economists early into the previous subsidy boom. For a time, cities and states appeared to have wised up. Taxpayers covered 68 percent of the costs of major sports venues built or renovated between 1992 and 2008, but only 31 percent of the costs from 2009 to 2020, according to research that Victor Matheson, an economist at the College of Holy Cross, shared with The Athletic. Unfortunately, this turned out to be just a lull. Team owners tend to demand stadium upgrades at the end of their leases, which typically last 30 years. Camden Yards, which spurred the last subsidy boom, was built 32 years ago. We are merely reentering stadium-subsidy season.This time, the costs promise to be even higher, the consequences even more depressing. As the expense of stadium construction has gone up, so has the size of the subsidies owners ask for—along with the shamelessness and determination with which they seek them out. That’s one reason so many teams have threatened to relocate in just the past few months. The American major leagues are all more profitable than they’ve ever been—Major League Baseball alone made a record $11.6 billion in 2023, the NFL $19 billion—while individual teams are more valuable, thanks in part to subsidies. As Matheson told me in 2022, “Any time a team gets a new stadium, you immediately see its valuation rise.”The situation presents a classic collective-action problem. American cities would all be better off if stadium subsidies disappeared. But individual political leaders seem to be afraid to buck the trend unilaterally, lest they be blamed for the departure of a beloved franchise.The obvious solution is federal legislation. A good start would be to reverse the existing, obscure statutory provision that helped make the stadium-subsidy cycle possible. Congress made interest on municipal bonds tax-exempt in 1913 in order to encourage public infrastructure spending. The intention was not to finance private construction, and in the 1986 Tax Reform Act, Congress tried to cut off that form of misappropriation. What the law should have done was simply revoke access to tax-exempt bonds for use on private projects, such as stadiums. Instead, it left a loophole. It enabled state and local governments to issue tax-exempt bonds for private projects as long as they finance at least 90 percent of the cost of the project themselves and pay no more than 10 percent of the debt service using revenues generated by the project. Essentially, a city could access the bonds only if it was willing to drain its own funds for the benefit of sports-franchise owners. The assumption was that no city would be stupid enough to accept such a bad bargain—but that assumption turned out to be deeply mistaken. Lawmakers have introduced bills seeking to correct the oversight several times over the years, but none has become law.In the meantime, change is up to sports fans. As beloved as sports are in America, socializing stadium construction remains unpopular. Indeed, when stadium subsidies are put to voters, many of them fail, as a referendum on a sales-tax extension to pay for new stadiums for the Chiefs and Royals recently did in Kansas City. Some groups, such as the Coalition to Stop the Arena at Potomac Yard, which organized against a proposed $1.5 billion subsidy for Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Wizards and Washington Capitals, have recently even managed to stop subsidized projects before that point. “Teams need a place to play, and if local governments told them to pay a fair rent or go pound sand, owners would have little choice but to go along,” Neil deMause, a co-author of Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit, told me.[Matt Connolly: Enjoy your awful basketball team, Virginia]Telling owners to pound sand, however, would require cities, and fans, to call a billionaire’s bluff. That is no small thing. Teams don’t usually relocate, but when they do, it’s painful; as an Oakland sports fan, I know this from experience. I empathize with the impulse to tell politicians to do whatever it takes to keep a team. Especially when I think of all the A’s games I won’t be able to take my son to.But “whatever it takes” is an untenable stance, especially when the bill from last time has not yet fully been paid, and the likelihood of a return on the investment is so demonstrably dubious. In Alameda County, where I live, taxpayers are still paying off the debt issued to renovate the Oakland Coliseum in 1995. When the tab is finally settled, the subsidy will have cost us $350 million, paid for mostly out of the general fund. In that time, Oakland has contended with several historic budget shortfalls and struggled to address its competing crises, including homelessness and rising crime. Giving $855 million to John Fisher, the A’s owner, would not have solved these problems. The evidence suggests, in fact, that it would have only made things worse. One wonders how much more evidence will have accumulated 30 years from now, when the next subsidy boom threatens to begin.

If you want to gauge whether a protest chant is genocidal or anti-Semitic or disagreeable in any other way, you have to pay attention to more than the words. A chant is a performance, not a text. A leader initiates a call-and-response or else yells into a bullhorn, eliciting roars from the crowd. Hands clap, feet stomp, drums are beaten. The chanting creates a rhythm that can induce a sort of hypnosis, fusing individuals into a movement. The beat should be no more sophisticated than Bum-bah bum-bah bum-bah bum-bah, as in, “There is only one solution! Intifada, revolution!” To claim that a chant means only what it says is like asserting that a theatrical production is the same as a script.You can start with the words, though. Take the chant about intifada revolution. Etymologically, intifada denotes a shaking-off, but in contemporary Arabic, it means an uprising: For instance, a 1952 uprising in Iraq against the Hashemite monarchy is referred to in Arabic as an intifada. But in English, including in English-language dictionaries and encyclopedias, the word refers primarily to two periods of sustained Palestinian revolt, the First and Second Intifadas. The first, which ran from 1987 to 1993, involved protests and acts of civil disobedience and was relatively peaceful, at least compared with the second, from 2000 to 2005, which featured Palestinian suicide bombings and targeted reprisal killings by Israeli forces; more than a thousand Israelis died in 138 suicide attacks. These intifadas received so much international press coverage that surely everyone in the world to whom the word means anything at all thinks of them first. The more general idea of insurrection can only be a poor second.If that’s the association, then intifada is not a phrase that would indicate genocidal intent. Total casualties on both sides during these earlier periods of conflict run to somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000. At its most innocuous, though, it still implies violence. In the context of this particular chant, it might imply much more than that. Revolution doubles and intensifies intifada—an uprising is the beginning of a fight; a revolution is the wholesale destruction of a social order. “There is only one solution”: This has been deemed offensive on the grounds that “solution” evokes the Final Solution, the term used to describe the German decision to kill all Jews during World War II. The more salient point, it seems to me, is that the declaration rejects the idea that there is a political path to peace. It says that diplomacy is not an option, and compromise is not a possibility.Of course, that’s just the chant on the page. The chant on college campuses is one slogan among many, taking on meaning from those that come before and after it. And, at the same time, it may be uttered by people who don’t care what they’re saying. At any given march or rally, some number of participants will have shown up in order to show up, to signal membership in a movement that they identify with much more than they agree with. When the protesters aren’t directly affected by the matter they’re protesting, the politics of identity frequently supersede the politics of ideas, as Nate Silver pointed out in his Substack newsletter last week. Participating in a political action becomes a way of fitting in, and a chant is the price of admission. As the police enter campus after campus, I’m guessing that the chants also channel rage at the authorities. “Free Palestine!,” sure, but also, Free my friends!And yet, the plain meaning of a chant has an impact, even if the chanters aren’t fully aware of it. A chant is particularly effective when its message echoes and explains the overall mise-en-scène. “Globalize the Intifada!” is an ironically apt chorus for students marching through an American campus under Palestinian flags, their heads shrouded in keffiyehs, their faces covered in KN95 masks. “We don’t want no Zionists here!” has the ring of truth when chanted at an encampment where students identified as Zionists have been forced out by a human chain.The other day, I stood outside a locked gate at Columbia University, near a group of protesters who had presumably come to support the students but couldn’t get inside. From the other side of the gate, a bespectacled student in a keffiyeh worked them into a rage, yelling hoarsely into a microphone and, at moments of peak excitement, jumping up and down. She had her rotation: “Intifada revolution,” then “Palestine is our demand; no peace on stolen land!” Then “Free, free Palestine!” Then “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Finally, “Intifada, Intifada!” No one stopping to watch could fail to get the message. The young woman wasn’t calling for a cease-fire or a binational confederation of Palestine and Israel. She was calling for war. Is that anti-Semitic? It depends on whether you think that the violent eradication of the state of Israel is anti-Semitic.Chants may feel like spontaneous outbursts of political sentiment, but they almost never are. So where do they come from? Social media, of course—most chants are rhyming couplets; repeated a few times, they’re just the right length for an Instagram Story. Another source is the political-organizing manuals that are sometimes called toolkits. These function more or less as a movement’s hymnals. The “rally toolkit” of the group Within Our Lifetime, a radical pro-Palestinian organization with connections on American campuses, lists 40 chants. I’ve heard almost half of them at Columbia, including “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” which, I learned from the toolkit, is a translation of a chant in Arabic. A fall-2023 Palestine Solidarity Working Group toolkit contains chant sheets from the Palestine Youth Movement and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. (This word salad of names is in no way nefarious; political organizing is the art of building coalitions.) The lists overlap, with minor differences: The Palestinian Youth Movement’s sheet, for instance, includes several “Cross Movement Chants” that connect the Palestinian cause to others, such as “Stop the U.S. War machine—From Palestine to the Philippines.”Some observers believe that one toolkit in particular reflects outside influence. A lawsuit claiming that Hamas is working with the national leadership of two organizations, National Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, has just been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Virginia on behalf of nine American and Israeli plaintiffs, including six victims of October 7; it specifically cites NSJP’s Day of Resistance Toolkit as evidence. The chairman of AMP, Hatem Bazian, who was also one of NSJP’s founders, denies the claim, and told The Washington Post that the lawsuit is a defamatory “Islamophobic text reeking in anti-Palestinian racism.” The question remains to be adjudicated, but it is safe to say that the toolkit makes NSJP’s ideological affinities clear. The toolkit, released immediately after October 7, advised chapters to celebrate Hamas’s attack as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance” and to lay the groundwork for October 12, “a national day of resistance” on campuses. Student groups across the country did in fact hold rallies and walkouts on October 12, two weeks before Israel invaded Gaza.The Day of Resistance Toolkit is an extraordinary artifact, written in stilted, triumphalist prose that could have been airlifted out of a badly translated Soviet parade speech. “Fearlessly, our people struggle for complete liberation and return,” the document states. “Glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people.” NSJP includes graphics for easy poster-making; one of these is a now-notorious drawing of a crowd cheering a paraglider, a clear allusion to the Hamas militants who paraglided into Israel. And under “Messaging & Framing” come several bullet points; one group of these is preceded by the heading “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” Under it, one finds the entire state of Israel, a recognized member-state of the United Nations, defined as an occupation, rather than just the West Bank, and its citizens characterized as “settlers” rather than civilians “because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.” If Israelis are not civilians, of course, then murdering them could count as a legitimate act of war. That heading, inverted (“Resistance is justified when people are occupied”), was soon being chanted by thousands of people around the country. The phrases did not originate with the toolkit, but it surely gave them a boost.Many protest chants come across as unoriginal, but lack of originality is actually desirable. The more familiar a chant’s wording and cadence, the easier it is to pick up. A chant modeled on a much older one may also subtly advance a geopolitical argument. “Hey hey, ho ho! Zionism has got to go!,” which is an echo of “Hey hey, ho ho! LBJ has got to go!,” suggests a link between Gaza and Vietnam, Israeli imperialism and American imperialism. I don’t think that’s a stretch. The 1968 analogy is everywhere. Last week, I watched a Columbia protest leader praise a crowd by saying that they’re continuing what the anti-war protesters started. That night, dozens of today’s protesters did exactly that by occupying Hamilton Hall, also occupied in 1968.I’m guessing that the Houthis—another Iranian-backed terrorist group, which controls a part of Yemen—provided a template for at least one chant. Around February, Columbia’s protesters were recorded chanting “There is no safe place! Death to the Zionist state!,” which struck me, in this context, as a taunting reply to Jewish students’ complaints about safety, followed by what sounded like a version of the actual, official Houthi slogan “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” And indeed, a month earlier, the crowd had openly chanted in support of the Houthis, who had been firing missiles at ships traveling through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The U.S. and Britain had just begun bombing them to stop the attacks, and the students sang, “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around!”Does support for the Houthis and alleged support for Hamas mean that the students also support the groups’ sponsor, Iran? I doubt that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the student groups exchange messages on Signal. But at the very least, the chants raise the possibility that some of the more extreme radicals on campus align themselves with the Iranian government’s geopolitical orientation more than with America’s, and have somehow persuaded their followers to mouth such views.One slogan, however, has become emblematic of the debate over the possible anti-Semitic content of pro-Palestinian chants. Its stature can be attributed, in part, to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik, who infamously insisted, during hearings on campus anti-Semitism, that it amounted to a call for genocide. The slogan, of course, is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Israel’s supporters hear it as eliminationist: From the Jordan to the Mediterranean, which is to say, across the land that had been under British control before it was partitioned by the United Nations in 1947, Palestine will be free of Jews. Where are they supposed to go? Many Jews find the possible answers to that question very disturbing. Palestinians and their allies, however, reject the Jewish interpretation as a form of catastrophizing. They say that the chant expresses the dream of a single, secular, democratic nation in which Palestinians and Jews would live peacefully side by side, in lieu of the existing Jewish ethno-nationalist state. (It is hard to dispute that in this scenario, Jewish Israelis would lose the power of collective self-determination.)Before “From the river to the sea” caught on in English, it was chanted in Arabic. It is not clear when it first came into use, but Elliott Colla, a scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, believes that it emerged during the First Intifada—or rather, two versions of it did. One was nationalist: “Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya”: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.” The other was Islamist: “Falasteen Islamiyyeh, min al-nahr ila al-bahr”: “Palestine is Islamic from the river to the sea.” At some point during the Oslo peace process, Colla says, a third chant appeared: “Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Falasteen satataharrar,” or “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” “It is this version—with its focus on freedom—that has circulated within English-language solidarity culture from at least the 1990s,” Colla writes in a recent article.Therefore, Colla writes, “Palestine will be free” should be considered a new chant expressing the ideal of a more inclusive state, not merely a translation of the older, more aggressive chants. It gives voice to a “much more capacious vision of a shared political project.” The problem with Colla’s benign reading of the slogan, however, is that the more nationalist or Islamist Arab-language chants are still in circulation; they share airtime with the English-language variant at American protests. In January, I started seeing videos of American students chanting “Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya.” The menace implicit in the Arabic chant bleeds into the English-language version.If a chant’s meaning changes according to the other ones being chanted at the same event, the signs being waved, the leader’s general affect, and so on, then today’s chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are not beautiful messages of peace. A voice breaking the calm of a neoclassical quad with harsh cries of “Intifada, Intifada” is not a harbinger of harmonious coexistence. “We don’t want two states! We want all of it!” seems especially uncompromising when sung next to snow that’s been stained blood-red with paint. (I imagine that the red snow was meant to allude to the blood of Gazans, but sometimes a symbol means more than it is intended to mean.) Student protesters often say that all they want is for the killing to stop. That may well be true. But that is not what they’re chanting, or how they’re chanting it.

Donald Trump has been talking differently about abortion lately. The former president, who once promised to sign a federal ban into law, now insists that, if reelected, he would let each state chart its own course on the issue. Some states might ban all abortions, try to restrict pregnant women’s out-of-state travel, or perhaps even monitor their pregnancies. Others would allow abortions for almost any reason up to viability. Trump says he would let it all happen. As he told Time magazine, “I’m leaving everything up to the states.”The phrasing suggests that a second Trump presidency would take the federal government out of the abortion debate, an approach that evokes restraint and polls pretty well. But almost no one who works on either side of the issue believes that Trump will be so passive. If elected in November, Trump would reenter office with broad executive authority to restrict abortion access. Both his loyal anti-abortion supporters and his staunch pro-abortion-rights opponents agree that he would use at least some of those powers. The only real questions are which ones, and to what extent?“Essentially, states’ rights is Trump’s way of saying, ‘If you don’t like the GOP’s position on abortion, you can ignore it when it comes to me, because my being in office is not going to make a difference,’” Mary Ziegler, a UC Davis law professor who supports abortion rights, told me. “He’s been pretty explicit at various points that that’s what he thinks Republicans should say to win, and that their primary goal right now, when it comes to abortion, should be winning.”[From the January/February 2024 issue: A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere]Trump’s position on abortion has long appeared to track his political instincts rather than any fixed personal conviction. In 1999, he described himself as “very pro-choice.” During the 2016 presidential campaign, courting evangelical support, he recast himself as strictly anti-abortion. He vowed to sign a 20-week abortion ban, defund Planned Parenthood, and nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. Since Roe fell, he has been eager to take credit—he declared last summer that he was “proud to be the most pro-life president in American history”—while distancing himself from actual anti-abortion policies, which are broadly unpopular. Earlier this year, after criticizing Governor Ron DeSantis for signing a six-week ban into law in Florida, he toyed with endorsing a 15- or 16-week national ban, but has backed away since clinching the Republican nomination. A federal ban, Trump told Time, would “never happen” anyway, because even a Republican-controlled Congress wouldn’t have the votes.He’s right about that. A national 15-week ban would have almost no chance in Congress, and Trump therefore has no reason to alienate moderate voters by supporting one—especially given that he would have the tools to set even stricter policy without congressional buy-in.At a minimum, a second Trump administration is likely to reverse the steps that the Biden administration has taken to shore up abortion access. These include instructing hospitals in abortion-ban states that they must perform abortions in cases of medical emergencies, making it harder for law enforcement to access the medical records of women who travel out of state to receive an abortion, and, most significant, allowing abortion pills to be prescribed without an in-person doctor visit. The change was a major factor in abortion numbers going up after the Dobbs decision, in large part because women in states that have banned the procedure can still obtain abortion drugs from out of state. From July to September last year, at least one of every six abortions nationwide, about 14,000 a month, was completed via telehealth, according to research by the Society of Family Planning.Roger Severino, who served as a Health and Human Services official during Trump’s first term, told me that he expects a second Trump administration to immediately reverse these executive actions. Severino, who is not affiliated with the Trump campaign, said that the best evidence for what a second Trump term would look like is what Trump did during his first four years in office. “It was the most pro-life administration in history,” he said.If Trump stopped at rolling back Biden’s abortion policies, that would arguably fit the definition of leaving the issue to the states. But it would also represent a radical change from the status quo because states that prohibit abortion would have far more power to make sure that women who live within their borders cannot access the procedure. The effect on abortion numbers would be “enormous,” Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. “All of a sudden, you would be back in a world where people would have to use brick-and-mortar clinics to get abortion care.”And Trump could go much further. He could appoint Food and Drug Administration officials who decide to revisit the approval of mifepristone, the first pill in a two-drug medication-abortion regimen. (The second drug is misoprostol.) Many members of the anti-abortion movement have argued that abortion pills are more dangerous than surgical abortions. (Some women have faced serious complications, though studies show the risks are far lower than those associated with most common drugs, or with giving birth.) In “Project 2025,” a blueprint for a second Trump term organized by the Heritage Foundation, Severino wrote that the FDA is “ethically and legally obliged to revisit and withdraw its initial approval of abortion pills.”If the FDA reversed its approval of mifepristone, women could still get misoprostol-only abortions, which are broadly considered to be safe and effective but tend to involve worse side effects, such as vomiting and diarrhea. The Alliance Defending Freedom, an influential conservative Christian legal organization that has challenged mifepristone’s approval in court, wants to go even further. Ryan Bangert, a senior vice president at ADF, told me that the group intends to limit misoprostol access as well. A victory could effectively stop all medication abortion, which currently accounts for nearly two-thirds of the country’s abortions.Trump could achieve similar results in other ways. The Comstock Act, a 19th-century statute, prohibits mailing “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” intended to be used for abortion. It applies to the U.S. Postal Service and private carriers. The law sat mostly dormant for the past half-century, as Roe v. Wade rendered it a dead letter. Opinions differ as to the exact scope of its prohibitions. When the Dobbs decision came out, Biden’s Department of Justice announced that Comstock would apply only to illegal abortions. But Trump’s DOJ could interpret the law more expansively. “Project 2025,” which was written by a group that included some of Trump’s most loyal former officials, explicitly recommends enforcing the law against providers who send abortion pills through the mail. James Bopp Jr., the general counsel of the National Right to Life Committee, a prominent anti-abortion group, expects a Trump DOJ to use Comstock that way. And, he told me, the lobbyists he works with will be doing what they can to make sure that happens. Whether it does will likely come down to whom Trump appoints to key administration positions.Some experts believe that the Comstock Act can be read to prohibit the delivery of any medical equipment used in surgical abortions. At the broadest level, that interpretation would shut down an implausibly huge swath of non-abortion-related health care. But the next administration could engage in selective enforcement with the aim of imposing a de facto nationwide abortion ban. “Everything you use to produce an abortion is somehow sent through the mail,” David S. Cohen, a Drexel University law professor and abortion-rights supporter, told me. Trump’s administration wouldn’t need congressional approval to enforce the Comstock Act this way. “Trump might even be able to say, ‘Oh, that’s not what I want, but the attorney general is doing it, and who am I to stop the attorney general?’”Trump has so far refused to clarify his stance on the Comstock Act, telling Time that he would soon be “making a statement” on it. As my colleague Elaine Godfrey has written, many of Trump’s supporters in the anti-abortion movement hope he keeps quiet about the law until he’s safely in office—at which point, they seem confident, he’ll fulfill their hopes. “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan Mitchell, a lawyer who has argued on Trump’s behalf before the Supreme Court, toldThe New York Times. But, he added, “I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.”Some lawyers close to Trump aren’t keeping their mouths shut. Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s lead attorneys in his first impeachment trial, wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court that mailing abortion drugs, devices, or equipment is a federal offense under the Comstock Act. “The prohibition is simple, complete, and categorical,” Sekulow wrote.[Elaine Godfrey: The pro-life movement’s not-so-secret plan for Trump]Where will Trump’s political instincts lead him? With no reelection to worry about, he will have less to fear from any backlash. But, by the same token, he will have little reason to pander to the religious right. Severino, the former Trump official, argued that it would be impractical for law enforcement to intercept misoprostol, which has uses besides abortion, and medical tools. “The reach of Comstock has been exaggerated by the left for political purposes,” he told me.Abortion-rights advocates have heard this accusation before. They were told they were exaggerating the threat of a Trump presidency before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, given that the justices publicly insisted it was settled law, Greer Donley told me. And the anti-abortion movement isn’t hiding its wish list for a second Trump term. “Every single thing that people who support abortion rights have been worried about has been coming to pass,” Donley said. “It’s hard to argue that there’s any sort of hyperbole anymore.”

They appear every spring, like crocuses or robins or perhaps black flies: commencement addresses. Thousands of them, across the country and across the variety of American higher education—two-year schools, four-year schools, small colleges, universities both public and private, schools of every kind. And they will appear again, despite how unusual this spring has been. Many campuses have been roiled by protests about the war in Gaza, and some institutions will curtail graduation ceremonies. But the members of this undergraduate class, who had their high-school graduations shut down by COVID in 2020, have long looked forward to a second chance at a commencement ceremony. Over the next month or so, even in the face of disruptions or cancellations, commencement addresses will be delivered to about 4 million students earning some kind of college degree.Most of these addresses will pass into oblivion. It is a cliché for commencement speakers to open their remarks by confessing that they remember nothing about their own graduation: They have forgotten not just what was said, but who said it. Yet even if most commencement addresses prove far from memorable, the press and public eagerly anticipate them. News stories appear throughout the winter and early spring announcing who will speak where. Then, when the speakers have spoken, journalists and commentators rush to judge which should be considered the year’s best.A few speeches are anointed as classics to be visited or revisited for years. Admiral William McRaven’s 2014 address at the University of Texas at Austin has had more than 60 million YouTube viewers, all eager to learn the 10 takeaways from his Navy SEAL training. Thousands of Americans likely hear echoes in their head every morning of his promise that if you “make your bed,” it will change your life. More than 60 million people have also watched Steve Jobs’s Stanford University speech from 2005, which eerily anticipates his own death and urges graduates to “follow your heart.” J. K. Rowling’s 2008 Harvard talk about failure and imagination has attracted tens of millions of viewers, as has David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College address, “This Is Water.” All of these also ended up in print as well, designed to make attractive gifts. Admiral McRaven’s book became a New York Times No. 1 best seller. When Wallace died, in 2008, The Wall Street Journal republished the speech in his memory.[Read: A commencement address too honest to deliver in person]Commencement greatest hits reach well beyond these chart-toppers. Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Elle, and countless other outlets run articles each year on the season’s winners. “Looking for some new words of wisdom?” NPR asks on its website. The headline of its online database lists the 350 “Best Commencement Speeches, Ever” in alphabetical order (but, curiously, by first name), from Aaron Sorkin to Zubin Damania. Can all 350 really be the “best”?The assumption behind commencement speeches seems to be that even as graduates don their black robes and mortarboards, they don’t yet know quite enough. They must await, or perhaps endure, some final instruction, absorb some last missing life lesson, before they can be safely launched into what their education has supposedly prepared them for. Almost always these days, this instructional capstone is delivered by someone outside the institution, someone expected to have insight that extends beyond a university’s walls—perhaps representing a first step in the students’ transition into the “real world.” Many colleges and universities try to attract the most famous person they can. As graduation season approaches, speaker announcements take on the hallmarks of a competition: Which institutions did President Barack Obama choose for his three or four addresses each year? Who snagged Oprah Winfrey? Or Taylor Swift?Seeking a famous speaker may, on one level, represent an unseemly preoccupation with celebrity. But it fits the logic of the occasion. What better time to hear from someone who is regarded as, at least in some way, distinguished? Someone who has led what an institution perceives to be an inspiring and successful life? Yet even before our present moment of cancel culture and partisanship, university leaders have had to worry about selecting a speaker who might spark disruptions in a ceremony meant to be a celebration. High Point University, in North Carolina, which in 2005 welcomed Rudy Giuliani—admired in the aftermath of 9/11 as “America’s mayor”—presumably would not make that choice again today. Every spring sees its complement of speakers who are protested, heckled, or disinvited.Speakers, in turn, are attracted by a prestigious invitation, or perhaps by the presence of a child or grandchild in the graduating class—and, at times, by the offer of a substantial honorarium. Some institutions, though a minority, pay their speakers what can be hefty sums. One agent who represents a portfolio of prominent entertainers observed that fees for graduation speakers may go as high as $500,000. “Universities are vying for customers in the form of admissions, and this can be a great way to advertise and get people on campus,” she explained. When Matthew McConaughey’s $135,000 honorarium from the University of Houston was made public by inquisitive journalists in 2015, he quickly assured critics that he had donated it to charity. The Boston Globe touched off a small scandal when it reported the same year that three state schools had paid speakers $25,000 to $35,000 each.Serving as a commencement speaker is not all glory. Usually the honored guest must perform as the centerpiece of the lunches, dinners, and meet and greets that surround the actual ceremony. And of course there is the speech. Someone has to write it. It seems unimaginable that anyone other than David Foster Wallace could have created “This Is Water,” and Kenyon students remember seeing him surrounded by sheets of paper, inking in edits and scribbling addenda right up to the start of the ceremony. At Harvard, J. K. Rowling opened her remarks by admitting to the months of anxiety she experienced as she wrote her address. At least, she noted, her worries had resulted in her losing weight. Rowling’s speech was greeted with a two-minute standing ovation. Yet she vowed never to give a commencement address again.Many speeches are composed by someone other than the person who utters the words. Commencement speeches are not just a cultural ritual; they are an industry. A former Obama speechwriter told me recently that the springtime atmosphere at the Washington, D.C., public-affairs and communications firm where he now works is like the high-pressure environment of an accounting firm during tax season. Some of the market comprises regular clients, but a number of customers are one-offs. A lot of speechwriters hate doing commencement speeches, he said; they find it nearly impossible to come up with something fresh and compelling. These addresses, he went on, are unlike other genres of speeches, which tend to focus on the speaker. A commencement address has to be about the graduates: It is their day. Getting the “trite ideas out”—Pursue your passions! Turn failure into opportunity!—can be the first step toward “shaking loose” an idea, an angle that is distinctive to a particular speaker, place, and moment.In any given year, a speaker in high demand will deliver addresses at several colleges and universities. Barack Obama gave 23 graduation speeches during his presidency. In principle, these speeches should not be the same; each audience, each institution, each graduate wants to feel special. Besides, in this digital age, you are going to get caught. When word got around, in advance of his 2005 Class Day speech at Harvard, that the Meet the Press host Tim Russert sometimes recycled his remarks, students at Harvard passed around bingo cards printed with some of his favorite phrases and encouraged attendees to play.Senator Chuck Schumer doesn’t care about being caught. He loves graduations, and shows up, sometimes unannounced—perhaps even uninvited, though none of his hosts has ever said so—at as many as eight commencement ceremonies across the state of New York every year. He delivers the same speech every time. A student complained on a Reddit thread that he had heard the speech five times in six years—at his high-school, college, and graduate-school commencements, and at his sister’s high-school and college ceremonies. “OH F****,” his long-suffering family finally proclaimed, “NOT AGAIN.” (Perhaps, another Reddit contributor suggested, the graduates could arrange to do a sing-along.) When John Oliver, the host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, learned about Senator Schumer’s springtime follies, he couldn’t resist showing clips of him saying exactly the same thing year after year after year, with the same verbal sound effects and hand gestures—an “endless graduation-speech time loop.”The peril of graduation speeches is that, however hard you struggle, you are in danger of repeating not just yourself but every person who has ever given one. Asked to generate a commencement address, ChatGPT produces a script that sounds like every speech you’ve ever heard, because it is in fact just that: a distillation of everything everyone has ever said, or at least everything that ChatGPT has found available in its training data. Graduates should practice resilience, pursue purpose, nurture relationships, embrace change, innovate, accept their responsibility to lead, and persevere as they embark on their journey into “a world of infinite possibilities.”[Read: What John F. Kennedy’s moon speech reveals 50 years later]We have all heard this speech. We’ll hear versions of it again this spring. But we hope for something better, and we’ll scour newspapers and the internet to see if it has been delivered somewhere. We ask powerful, accomplished people to stand before us and, for a moment, present a different self—to open up, become vulnerable, be reflective, let us see inside. What is a meaningful life, and how do I live one? These are questions that are customarily reserved for late nights in undergraduate dormitories, for the years before the at-once tedious and terrifying burdens of Real Life—careers, mortgages, children, aging bodies, disappointed hopes—overtake us.Everything and nothing is at stake in a commencement address. Maybe you have already heard it eight times. Maybe there was nothing worth hearing in the first place. But perhaps you will encounter a speaker who, even in this tumultuous spring, can reach across the chasm of innocence and experience separating graduates and the person talking to them. The old endeavor to imagine themselves young and look through fresh eyes again; the young begin to imagine themselves old, as they will become all too soon.The best commencement address is a gift—of self and of hope across generations. It is not surprising that these speeches so rarely succeed. The surprise should be when they do. Innocence can only faintly imagine experience. No generation can really explain to another what is to come. And experience can never recapture innocence, however wistful we may be for what has been lost. The beauty of commencement speeches is that they represent a moment when we try.

When Nan Goldin danced in low-life go-go bars in Paterson, N.J.,I was a girl in Paterson, N.J., living next to a low-life go-go bar.While men fed her tips and she tucked them into her bikini,a fist hit an eye in a house in Paterson, like a flash going offin a dark kitchen. And in the corner, a girl stood watching.In the go-go dance of memory, the woman who was the girlcannot recall the fist reach the eye, but sees an arm blockinga door. Nan Goldin took the bus back to New York, and the girlsat next to her, not knowing she was an artist. The girl lookedout the window and said, in each house a family, in each kitchena fist and an eye. Nan Goldin counted the tips to see how much filmshe could buy. A friend dragged Nan Goldin from the apartmentthat night. The self-portrait of her bloodied eye saved her. The girl’sbrother told her years later: What you don’t remember is thathe gave her a black eye. She watches from a corner of her lifethe eye turn red, black, purple, green, yellow. Nan Goldin is the artistwho made art that saved the girl, and the girl will make an artof her life. She takes the bus from Paterson, N.J., to Nan Goldin’sloft, and inserts a slide of the black eye into Nan Goldin’sprojector. The girl wishes her mother could be there, to see herselflarger than life on the screen. Nan Goldin danced go-go in Patersonso she wouldn’t have to take off her top. The memory is not a stripteasethat ends with a blackened eye. The girl slips it like a slide into the partmemory won’t reveal, to complete the scene in which she is small andcannot help her mother leave. Nan Goldin photographed herself to forcethe door open. She pushed through it. I pushed through it.This poem appears in the June 2024 print edition.

Illustrations by Vartika Sharma1In the early spring of 2020, Barb Herrera taped a signed note to a wall of her bedroom in Orlando, Florida, just above her pillow. NOTICE TO EMS! it said. No Vent! No Intubation! She’d heard that hospitals were overflowing, and that doctors were being forced to choose which COVID patients they would try to save and which to abandon. She wanted to spare them the trouble.Barb was nearly 60 years old, and weighed about 400 pounds. She has type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and a host of other health concerns. At the start of the pandemic, she figured she was doomed. When she sent her list of passwords to her kids, who all live far away, they couldn’t help but think the same. “I was in an incredibly dark place,” she told me. “I would have died.”Until recently, Barb could barely walk—at least not without putting herself at risk of getting yet another fracture in her feet. Moving around the house exhausted her; she showered only every other week. She couldn’t make it to the mailbox on her own. Barb had spent a lifetime dealing with the inconveniences of being, as she puts it, “huge.” But what really scared her—and what embarrassed her, because dread and shame have a way of getting tangled up—were the moments when her little room, about 10 feet wide and not much longer, was less a hideout than a trap. At one point in 2021, she says, she tripped and fell on the way to the toilet. Her housemate and landlord—a high-school friend—was not at home to help, so Barb had to call the paramedics. “It took four guys to get me up,” she said.Later that year, when Barb finally did get COVID, her case was fairly mild. But she didn’t feel quite right after she recovered: She was having trouble breathing, and there was something off about her heart. Finally, in April 2022, she went to the hospital and her vital signs were taken.The average body mass index for American adults is 30. Barb’s BMI was around 75. A blood-sugar test showed that her diabetes was not under control—her blood sugar was in the range where she might be at risk of blindness or stroke. And an EKG confirmed that her heart was skipping beats. A cardiac electrophysiologist, Shravan Ambati, came in for a consultation. He said the missed beats could be treated with medication, but he made a mental note of her severe obesity—he’d seen only one or two patients of Barb’s size in his 14-year career. Before he left, he paused to give her some advice. If she didn’t lose weight, he said, “the Barb of five years from now is not going to like you very much at all.” As she remembers it, he crossed his arms and added: “You will either change your life, or you’ll end up in a nursing home.”“That was it. That was it,” Barb told me. Imagining herself getting old inside a home, “in a row of old people who are fat as hell, just sitting there waiting to die,” she vowed to do everything she could to get well. She would try to change her life. Eventually, like millions of Americans, she would try the new miracle cure. Again.2In a way, Barb has never stopped trying to change her life. At 10 years old, she was prescribed amphetamines; at 12, she went to WeightWatchers. Later she would go on liquid diets, and nearly every form of solid diet. She’s been vegan and gluten-free, avoided fat, cut back on carbs, and sworn off processed foods. She’s taken drugs that changed her neurochemistry and gotten surgery to shrink her stomach to the size of a shot glass. She’s gone to food-addiction groups. She’s eaten Lean Cuisines. She’s been an avid swimmer at the Y. Barb Herrera weighed about 300 pounds by the time she was 30. (Courtesy of Barb Herrera) Through it all, she’s lost a lot of weight. Really an extraordinary quantity—well more than a quarter ton, if you add it up across her life. But every miracle so far has come with hidden costs: anemia, drug-induced depression, damage to her heart. Always, in the end, the weight has come back. Always, in the end, “success” has left her feeling worse.In the United States, an estimated 189 million adults are classified as having obesity or being overweight; certainly many millions have, like Barb, spent decades running on a treadmill of solutions, never getting anywhere. The ordinary fixes—the kind that draw on people’s will, and require eating less and moving more—rarely have a large or lasting effect. Indeed, America itself has suffered through a long, maddening history of failed attempts to change its habits on a national scale: a yo-yo diet of well-intentioned treatments, policies, and other social interventions that only ever lead us back to where we started. New rules for eating have been rolled out and then rolled back. Pills have been invented and abandoned. Laws have been rewritten to improve the quality of people’s diets and curb caloric intake—to make society less “obesogenic” on the whole. Efforts have been made to reduce discrimination over body size in employment settings and in health care. Through it all, obesity rates keep going up; the diabetes epidemic keeps worsening.The most recent miracle, for Barb as well as for the nation, has come in the form of injectable drugs. In early 2021, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk published a clinical trial showing remarkable results for semaglutide, now sold under the trade names Wegovy and Ozempic. Thomas Wadden, a clinical psychologist and obesity researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied weight-loss interventions for more than 40 years (and who has received both research grants and fees from Novo Nordisk), remembers when he first learned about those findings, at an internal meeting at the company the year before. “My jaw just dropped,” he told me. “I really could not believe what we were seeing.” Patients in the study who’d had injections of the drug lost, on average, close to 15 percent of their body weight—more than had ever been achieved with any other drug in a study of that size. Wadden knew immediately that this would be “an incredible revolution in the treatment of obesity.”[Radio Atlantic: Could Ozempic derail the body-positivity movement?]Semaglutide is in the class of GLP-1 receptor agonists, chemicals derived from lizard venom that mimic gut hormones and appear to reshape our metabolism and eating behavior for as long as the drugs are taken. Earlier versions were already being used to treat diabetes; then, in 2022, a newer one from Eli Lilly—tirzepatide, sold as Zepbound or Mounjaro—produced an average weight loss of 20 percent in a clinical trial. Many more drugs are now racing through development: survodutide, pemvidutide, retatrutide. (Among specialists, that last one has produced the most excitement: An early trial found an average weight loss of 24 percent in one group of participants.)The past four decades of American history underline just how much is riding on these drugs—and serve as a sobering reminder that it is impossible to know, in the first few years of any novel intervention, whether its success will last.The drugs don’t work for everyone. Their major side effects—nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea—can be too intense for many patients. Others don’t end up losing any weight. That’s not to mention all the people who might benefit from treatment but don’t have access to it: For the time being, just 25 percent of private insurers offer the relevant coverage, and the cost of treatment—about $1,000 a month—has been prohibitive for many Americans.But there’s growing pressure for GLP-1 drugs to be covered without restrictions by Medicare, and subject to price negotiation. Eventually they will start to come off patent. When that happens, usage is likely to explode. The drugs have already been approved not just for people with diabetes or obesity, but for anyone who has a BMI of more than 27 and an associated health condition, such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. By those criteria, more than 140 million American adults already qualify—and if this story goes the way it’s gone for other “risk factor” drugs such as statins and antihypertensives, then the threshold for prescriptions will be lowered over time, inching further toward the weight range we now describe as “normal.”How you view that prospect will depend on your attitudes about obesity, and your tolerance for risk. The first GLP-1 drug to receive FDA approval, exenatide, has been used as a diabetes treatment for more than 20 years. No long-term harms have been identified—but then again, that drug’s long-term effects have been studied carefully only across a span of seven years. Today, adolescents are injecting newer versions of these drugs, and may continue to do so every week for 50 years or more. What might happen over all that time? Could the drugs produce lasting damage, or end up losing some of their benefit?Athena Philis-Tsimikas, an endocrinologist who works at Scripps Health in San Diego and whose research has received ample funding from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, says the data so far look very good. “These are now being used, literally, in hundreds of thousands of people across the world,” she told me, and although some studies have suggested that GLP-1 drugs may cause inflammation of the pancreas, or even tumor growth, these concerns have not borne out. Exenatide, at least, keeps working over many years, and its side effects don’t appear to worsen. Still, we have less to go on with the newer drugs, Philis-Tsimikas said. “All of us, in the back of our minds, always wonder, Will something show up?  ” Although no serious problems have yet emerged, she said, “you wonder, and you worry.”The GLP-1 drugs may well represent a shocking breakthrough for the field of public health, on the order of vaccines and sanitation. They could also fizzle out, or end in a surge of tragic, unforeseen results. But in light of what we’ve been through, it’s hard to see what other choices still remain. For 40 years, we’ve tried to curb the spread of obesity and its related ailments, and for 40 years, we’ve failed. We don’t know how to fix the problem. We don’t even understand what’s really causing it. Now, again, we have a new approach. This time around, the fix had better work.3Barb’s first weight-loss miracle, and America’s, came during a moment of profound despair. In 1995, while working in a birthing center, she’d tripped on a scale—“the irony of all ironies,” she told me—and cracked her ankle. When she showed up for the surgery that followed, Barb, then 34 and weighing 330 pounds, learned that she had type 2 diabetes. In a way, this felt like her inheritance: Both grandparents on Barb’s father’s side had obesity and diabetes, as did her dad, his brother, and two sisters. Her mother, too, had obesity. Now, despite Barb’s own years of efforts to maintain her health, that legacy had her in its grip.The doctors threatened Barb (as doctors often have): If she didn’t find a way to eat in moderation, she might not make it through the end of 1997. Then she got some new advice: Yes, Barb should eat better food and exercise, but also maybe she should try a pair of drugs, dexfenfluramine and phentermine, together known as “fen-phen.” The former had just received approval from the FDA, and research showed that a combination of the two, taken several times a day, was highly effective at reducing weight.[Read: The weight-loss-drug revolution is a miracle—and a menace]The treatment was a revelation. Even when she talks about it now, Barb begins to cry. She’d tried so many diets in the past, and made so little progress, but as soon as she started on the weight-loss medication, something changed. A low and steady hum that she’d experienced ever since she was a kid—Where can I eat? How can I eat? When can I eat?—disappeared, leaving her in a strange new state of quiet. “The fen-phen turned that off just within a day. It was gone,” she told me, struggling to get out the words. “What it did was tell me that I’m not crazy, that it really wasn’t me.”At the time, Wadden, the obesity researcher and clinician, was hearing similar reports from his patients, who started telling him that their relationship with food had been transformed, that suddenly they were free of constant cravings. Over the course of a small, year-long study of the drugs that Wadden ran with a colleague at Penn, Robert Berkowitz, participants lost about 14 percent of their body weight on average. That’s the same level of success that would be seen for semaglutide several decades later. “Bob and I really were high-fiving each other,” Wadden told me. “We were feeling like, God, we’ve got a cure for obesity.”The fen-phen revolution arrived at a crucial turning point for Wadden’s field, and indeed for his career. By then he’d spent almost 15 years at the leading edge of research into dietary interventions, seeing how much weight a person might lose through careful cutting of their calories. But that sort of diet science—and the diet culture that it helped support—had lately come into a state of ruin. Americans were fatter than they’d ever been, and they were giving up on losing weight. According to one industry group, the total number of dieters in the country declined by more than 25 percent from 1986 to 1991. In 1988, Oprah Winfrey brought a wagon of fat on air to represent the 67 pounds she’d lost using a liquid diet. (Associated Press) “I’ll never diet again,” Oprah Winfrey had announced on her TV show at the end of 1990. Not long before, she’d kicked off a major trend by talking up her own success with a brand of weight-loss shakes called Optifast. But Winfrey’s slimmer figure had been fleeting, and now the $33 billion diet industry was under scrutiny for making bogus scientific claims.Rejecting diet culture became something of a feminist cause. “A growing number of women are joining in an anti-diet movement,” The New York Times reported in 1992. “They are forming support groups and ceasing to diet with a resolve similar to that of secretaries who 20 years ago stopped getting coffee for their bosses. Others have smashed their bathroom scales with the abandon that some women in the 1960’s burned their bras.”That same Times story included a quote from Wadden, who cautioned that these changing attitudes might end up being “dangerous.” But Wadden’s own views of dieting were also changing. His prior research showed that patients could lose up to one-fifth of their body weight by going on very strict diets that allowed for no more than 800 calories a day. But he’d found that it was difficult for his patients to maintain that loss for long, once the formal program was over. Now Wadden and other obesity researchers were reaching a consensus that behavioral interventions might produce in the very best scenario an average lasting weight loss of just 5 to 10 percent.National surveys completed in 1994 showed that the adult obesity rate had surged by more than half since 1980, while the proportion of children classified as overweight had doubled. The need for weight control in America had never seemed so great, even as the chances of achieving it were never perceived to be so small.Then a bolt of science landed in this muddle and despair. In December 1994, the Times ran an editorial on what was understood to be a pivotal discovery: A genetic basis for obesity had finally been found. Researchers at Rockefeller University were investigating a molecule, later named leptin, that gets secreted from fat cells and travels to the brain, and that causes feelings of satiety. Lab mice with mutations in the leptin gene—importantly, a gene also found in humans—overeat until they’re three times the size of other mice. “The finding holds out the dazzling hope,” the editorial explained, “that scientists may, eventually, come up with a drug treatment to help overweight Americans shed unwanted, unhealthy pounds.”Leptin-based treatments for obesity were in the works, according to the researchers, and might be ready for the public in five years, maybe 10. In the meantime, the suggestion that obesity was a biochemical disease, more a function of a person’s genes than of their faulty habits or lack of will, dovetailed with the nation’s shift away from dieting. If there was any hope of solving the problem of obesity, maybe this was it.Wadden was ready to switch gears. “I realized that we had sort of reached our limits on what we could do with diet and physical activity,” he said. Now, instead, he started looking into pharmaceuticals. He’d already run one weight-loss study using sertraline, better known as Zoloft, and found that it had no effect. In 1995, he turned to fen-phen.Fen-phen wasn’t new, exactly—versions of its component drugs had been prescribed for decades. But when those pills were taken separately, their side effects were difficult to handle: “Fen” would make you drowsy and might give you diarrhea; “phen” could be agitating and lead to constipation. By the 1990s, though, doctors had begun to give the two together, such that their side effects would cancel each other out. And then a new and better version of “fen”—not fenfluramine but dexfenfluramine—came under FDA review.Some regulators worried that this better “fen” posed a risk of brain damage. And there were signs that “fen” in any form might lead to pulmonary hypertension, a heart-related ailment. But Americans had been prescribed regular fenfluramine since 1973, and the newer drug, dexfenfluramine, had been available in France since 1985. Experts took comfort in this history. Using language that is familiar from today’s assurances regarding semaglutide and other GLP-1 drugs, they pointed out that millions were already on the medication. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything significant in toxicity to the drug that hasn’t been picked up with this kind of experience,” an FDA official named James Bilstad would later say in a Time cover story headlined “The Hot New Diet Pill.” To prevent Americans with obesity from getting dexfenfluramine, supporters said, would be to surrender to a deadly epidemic. Judith Stern, an obesity expert and nutritionist at UC Davis, was clear about the stakes: “If they recommend no,” she said of the FDA-committee members, “these doctors ought to be shot.”In April 1996, the doctors recommended yes: Dexfenfluramine was approved—and became an instant blockbuster. Patients received prescriptions by the hundreds of thousands every month. Sketchy wellness clinics—call toll-free, 1-888-4FEN-FEN—helped meet demand. Then, as now, experts voiced concerns about access. Then, as now, they worried that people who didn’t really need the drugs were lining up to take them. By the end of the year, sales of “fen” alone had surpassed $300 million. “What we have here is probably the fastest launch of any drug in the history of the pharmaceutical industry,” one financial analyst told reporters.This wasn’t just a drug launch. It was nothing less than an awakening, for doctors and their patients alike. Now a patient could be treated for excess weight in the same way they might be treated for diabetes or hypertension—with a drug they’d have to take for the rest of their life. That paradigm, Time explained, reflected a deeper shift in medicine. In a formulation that prefigures the nearly identical claims being made about Ozempic and its ilk today, the article heralded a “new understanding of obesity as a chronic disease rather than a failure of willpower.”Barb started on fen-phen two weeks after it was approved. “I had never in my life felt normal until after about a week or two on the medications,” she’d later say. “My life before was hell.” She was losing weight, her blood sugar was improving, and she was getting to the pool, swimming 100 lengths five or six days a week. A few months later, when she read in her local newspaper that the Florida Board of Medicine was considering putting limits on the use of fen-phen, she was disturbed enough to send a letter to the editor. “I thank the creators of fen/phen for helping to save my life,” she wrote. “I don’t want to see the medications regulated so intensely that people like me are left out.”4For another year, Barb kept taking fen-phen, and for another year she kept losing weight. By July of 1997, she’d lost 111 pounds.Thomas Wadden and his colleague’s fen-phen study had by then completed its second year. The data showed that their patients’ shocking weight loss had mostly been maintained, as long as they stayed on the drugs. But before Wadden had the chance to write up the results, he got a call from Susan Yanovski, then a program officer at the National Institutes of Health and now a co-director of the NIH’s Office of Obesity Research. We’ve got a problem, Yanovski told him.News had just come out that, at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, two dozen women taking fen-phen—including six who were, like Barb, in their 30s—had developed cardiac conditions. A few had needed surgery, and on the operating table, doctors discovered that their heart valves were covered with a waxy plaque. They had “a glistening white appearance,” the doctors said, suggestive of disease. Now Yanovski wanted Wadden to look more closely at the women in his study.Wadden wasn’t terribly concerned, because no one in his study had reported any heart symptoms. But ultrasounds revealed that nearly one-third of them had some degree of leakage in their heart valves. His “cure for obesity” was in fact a source of harm. “That just felt like a crushing blow,” he told me. Several weeks later, a larger data set from the FDA confirmed the issue. Wadden worried to reporters that the whole fiasco would end up setting back obesity treatment by many years.[Read: The Ozempic revolution is stuck]The news put Barb in a panic. Not about her heart: The drug hadn’t caused her any problems, as far as she could tell; it had only solved them. But now they were taking it away. What then? She’d already spoken out about her new and better life to local outlets; now she did so again, on national TV. On September 16, the day after fenfluramine in both of its forms was pulled from the market, Barb appeared on CBS This Morning. She explained then, as she later would to me, that fen-phen had flipped a switch inside her brain. There was desperation in her voice.A few days later, she was in a limousine in New York City, invited to be on The Montel Williams Show. She wore a crisp floral dress; a chyron would identify her as “BARBARA: Will continue taking diet drug despite FDA recall.” “I know I can’t get any more,” she told Williams. “I have to use up what I have. And then I don’t know what I’m going to do after that. That’s the problem—and that is what scares me to death.” Telling people to lose weight the “natural way,” she told another guest, who was suggesting that people with obesity need only go on low-carb diets, is like “asking a person with a thyroid condition to just stop their medication.”“I did all this stuff to shout it from the rooftops that I was doing so well on fen-phen,” Barb told me. Still, all the warnings she’d been hearing on the news, and from her fellow Montel guests, started building up inside her head. When she got back to Orlando, she went to see her doctor, just in case. His testing showed that she did indeed have damage to her mitral valve, and that fen-phen seemed to be the cause. Barb swimming in 2003 (Courtesy of Barb Herrera) Five months later, she was back on CBS to talk about her tragic turnabout. The newscast showed Doppler footage of the backwards flow of blood into her heart. She’d gone off the fen-phen and had rapidly regained weight. “The voices returned and came back in a furor I’d never heard before,” Barb later wrote on her blog. “It was as if they were so angry at being silenced for so long, they were going to tell me 19 months’ worth of what they wanted me to hear. I was forced to listen. And I ate. And I ate. And ate.”5The Publix supermarket chain has, since its founding more than 90 years ago in central Florida, offered “people weighers,” free for use by all. They’re big, old-fashioned things, shaped like lollipops, with a dial readout at the top and handlebars of stainless steel. By the time I visited Barb last fall, in a subdivision of Orlando, she was determined to go and use one.She’d taken heed of what Ambati, the cardiologist, had told her when she went into the hospital in April 2022. She cut back on salt and stopped ordering from Uber Eats. That alone was enough to bring her weight down 40 pounds. Then she started on Trulicity, the brand name for a GLP-1 drug called dulaglutide that is prescribed to people with diabetes. (The drug was covered for her use by Medicaid.) In clinical trials, patients on dulaglutide tend to lose about 10 pounds, on average, in a year. For Barb, the effects were far more dramatic. When we first met in person, she’d been on Trulicity for 14 months—and had lost more than one-third of her body weight. “It’s not even like I’m skinny, but compared to 405, I feel like an Olympic runner,” she told me.We arrived at the supermarket in tandem with another middle-aged woman who was also there to check her weight. “Okay, you first, jump on!” Barb said. “My dream weight. I love it!” she said, when the pointer tipped to 230 pounds. “Not mine,” the other woman grumbled. Then Barb got on the scale and watched it spin to a little past 250. She was very pleased. The last number of the dial was 300. Even registering within its bounds was new.Some people with obesity describe a sense of being trapped inside another person’s body, such that their outward shape doesn’t really match their inner one. For Barb, rapid weight loss has brought on a different metaphysical confusion. When she looks in the mirror, she sometimes sees her shape as it was two years ago. In certain corners of the internet, this is known as “phantom fat syndrome,” but Barb dislikes that term. She thinks it should be called “body integration syndrome,” stemming from a disconnect between your “larger-body memory” and “smaller-body reality.”She has experienced this phenomenon before. After learning that she had heart-valve damage from fen-phen, Barb joined a class-action lawsuit against the maker of dexfenfluramine, and eventually received a substantial payout. In 2001, she put that money toward what would be her second weight-loss miracle—bariatric surgery. The effects were jarring, she remembers. Within just three months, she’d lost 100 pounds; within a year, she’d lost 190. She could ride a bike now, and do a cartwheel. “It was freakin’ wild,” she told me. “I didn’t have an idea of my body size.” She found herself still worried over whether chairs would break when she sat down. Turnstiles were confusing. For most of her adult life, she’d had to rotate sideways to go through them if she couldn’t find a gate, so that’s what she continued doing. Then one day her partner said, “No, just walk through straight,” and that’s what she did.Weight-loss surgery was somewhat unusual at the time, despite its record of success. About 60,000 such procedures were performed in 2001, by one estimate; compare that with the millions of Americans who had been taking fen-phen just a few years earlier. Bariatric surgeons and obesity physicians have debated why this treatment has been so grossly “underutilized.” (Even now, fewer than 1 percent of eligible patients with obesity have the procedure.) Surely some are dissuaded by the scalpel: As with any surgery, this one carries risks. It’s also clear that many doctors have refrained from recommending it. But the fen-phen fiasco of the late 1990s cast its shadow on the field as well. The very idea of “treating” excess weight, whether with a pill or with a knife, had been discredited. It seemed ill-advised, if not old-fashioned.[Read: The science behind Ozempic was wrong]By the turn of the millennium, a newer way to think about America’s rising rates of obesity was starting to take hold. The push was led by Thomas Wadden’s close friend and colleague Kelly Brownell. In the 1970s, the two had played together in a bluegrass band—Wadden on upright bass, Brownell on guitar—and they later worked together at the University of Pennsylvania. But when their field lost faith in low-calorie diets as a source of lasting weight loss, the two friends went in opposite directions. Wadden looked for ways to fix a person’s chemistry, so he turned to pharmaceuticals. Brownell had come to see obesity as a product of our toxic food environment: He meant to fix the world to which a person’s chemistry responded, so he started getting into policy.Inspired by successful efforts to reduce tobacco use, Brownell laid out a raft of new proposals in the ’90s to counter the effects of junk-food culture: a tax on non-nutritious snacks; a crackdown on deceptive health claims; regulation of what gets sold to kids inside school buildings. Those ideas didn’t find much traction while the nation was obsessed with fen-phen, but they caught on quickly in the years that followed, amid new and scary claims that obesity was indirectly hurting all Americans, not just the people with a lot of excess weight.In 2003, the U.S. surgeon general declared obesity “the terror within, a threat that is every bit as real to America as the weapons of mass destruction”; a few months later, Eric Finkelstein, an economist who studies the social costs of obesity, put out an influential paper finding that excess weight was associated with up to $79 billion in health-care spending in 1998, of which roughly half was paid by Medicare and Medicaid. (Later he’d conclude that the number had nearly doubled in a decade.) In 2004, Finkelstein attended an Action on Obesity summit hosted by the Mayo Clinic, at which numerous social interventions were proposed, including calorie labeling in workplace cafeterias and mandatory gym class for children of all grades.As the environmental theory gained currency, public-health officials took notice. In 2006, for example, the New York City Board of Health moved to require that calorie counts be posted on many chain restaurants’ menus, so customers would know how much they were eating. The city also banned trans fats. While first lady, Michelle Obama planted an organic garden at the White House as part of her effort to promote healthy eating. (Aude Guerrucci / Getty) Soon, the federal government took up many of the ideas that Brownell had helped popularize. Barack Obama had promised while campaigning for president that if America’s obesity trends could be reversed, the Medicare system alone would save “a trillion dollars.” By fighting fat, he implied, his ambitious plan for health-care reform would pay for itself. Once he was in office, his administration pulled every policy lever it could. The nation’s school-lunch program was overhauled. Nutrition labels got an update from the FDA, with more prominent displays of calories and a line for “added sugars.” Food benefits for families in poverty were adjusted to allow the purchase of more fruits and vegetables. The Affordable Care Act brought calorie labeling to chain restaurants nationwide and pushed for weight-loss programs through employer-based insurance plans.Michelle Obama helped guide these efforts, working with marketing experts to develop ways of nudging kids toward better diets and pledging to eliminate “food deserts,” or neighborhoods that lacked convenient access to healthy, affordable food. She was relentless in her public messaging; she planted an organic garden at the White House and promoted her signature “Let’s Move!” campaign around the country. The first lady also led a separate, private-sector push for change within Big Food. In 2010, the beverage giants agreed to add calorie labels to the front of their bottles and cans; PepsiCo pledged major cuts in fat, sodium, and added sugars across its entire product line within a decade.An all-out war on soda would come to stand in for these broad efforts. Nutrition studies found that half of all Americans were drinking sugar-sweetened beverages every day, and that consumption of these accounted for one-third of the added sugar in adults’ diets. Studies turned up links between people’s soft-drink consumption and their risks for type 2 diabetes and obesity. A new strand of research hinted that “liquid calories” in particular were dangerous to health.Brownell led the growing calls for an excise tax on soft drinks, like the one in place for cigarettes, as a way of limiting their sales. Few such measures were passed—the beverage industry did everything it could to shut them down—but the message at their core, that soda was a form of poison like tobacco, spread. In San Francisco and New York, public-service campaigns showed images of soda bottles pouring out a stream of glistening, blood-streaked fat. Michelle Obama led an effort to depict water—plain old water—as something “cool” to drink.The social engineering worked. Slowly but surely, Americans’ lamented lifestyle began to shift. From 2001 to 2018, added-sugar intake dropped by about one-fifth among children, teens, and young adults. From the late 1970s through the early 2000s, the obesity rate among American children had roughly tripled; then, suddenly, it flattened out. And although the obesity rate among adults was still increasing, its climb seemed slower than before. Americans’ long-standing tendency to eat ever-bigger portions also seemed to be abating.But sugary drinks—liquid candy, pretty much—were always going to be a soft target for the nanny state. Fixing the food environment in deeper ways proved much harder. “The tobacco playbook pretty much only works for soda, because that’s the closest analogy we have as a food item,” Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and the director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, told me. But that tobacco playbook doesn’t work to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables, he said. It doesn’t work to increase consumption of beans. It doesn’t work to make people eat more nuts or seeds or extra-virgin olive oil.[Read: What happens when you’ve been on Ozempic for 20 years?]Careful research in the past decade has shown that many of the Obama-era social fixes did little to alter behavior or improve our health. Putting calorie labels on menus seemed to prompt at most a small decline in the amount of food people ate. Employer-based wellness programs (which are still offered by 80 percent of large companies) were shown to have zero tangible effects. Health-care spending, in general, kept going up.And obesity rates resumed their ascent. Today, 20 percent of American children have obesity. For all the policy nudges and the sensible revisions to nutrition standards, food companies remain as unfettered as they were in the 1990s, Kelly Brownell told me. “Is there anything the industry can’t do now that it was doing then?” he asked. “The answer really is no. And so we have a very predictable set of outcomes.”“Our public-health efforts to address obesity have failed,” Eric Finkelstein, the economist, told me.6The success of Barb’s gastric-bypass surgery was also limited. “Most people reach their lowest weight about a year post-surgery,” Gretchen White, an epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. “We call it their weight nadir.”Barb’s weight nadir came 14 months after surgery; she remembers exactly when things began to turn around. She was in a store buying jeans, and realized she could fit into a size 8. By then she’d lost 210 pounds; her BMI was down to 27—lower than the average for a woman her age. Her body had changed so much that she was scared. “It was just too freaky to be that small,” she told me. “I wasn’t me. I wasn’t substantial.” She was used to feeling unseen, but now, in this new state, she felt like she was disappearing in a different way. “It’s really weird when you’re really, really fat,” she said. “People look at you, but they also look through you. You’re just, like, invisible. And then when you’re really small you’re invisible too, because you’re one of the herd. You’re one of everybody.”At that point, she started to rebound. The openings into her gastric pouch—the section of her stomach that wasn’t bypassed—stretched back to something like their former size. And Barb found ways to “eat around” the surgery, as doctors say, by taking food throughout the day in smaller portions. Her experience was not unusual. Bariatric surgeries can be highly effective for some people and nearly useless for others. Long-term studies have found that 30 percent of those who receive the same procedure Barb did regain at least one-quarter of what they lost within two years of reaching their weight nadir; more than half regain that much within five years. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to implement a ban on oversize sugary drinks. (Allison Joyce / Getty) But if the effects of Barb’s surgery were quickly wearing off, its side effects were not: She now had iron, calcium, and B12 deficiencies resulting from the changes to her gut. She looked into getting a revision of the surgery—a redo, more or less—but insurance wouldn’t cover it, and by then the money from her fen-phen settlement had run out. The pounds kept coming back.Barb’s relationship to medicine had long been complicated by her size. She found the health-care system ill-equipped—or just unwilling—to give her even basic care. During one hospital visit in 1993, she remembers, a nurse struggled to wrap a blood-pressure cuff around her upper arm. When it didn’t fit, he tried to strap it on with tape, but even then, the cuff kept splitting open. “It just grabs your skin and gives you bruises. It’s really painful,” she said. Later she’d find out that the measurement can also be taken by putting the cuff around a person’s forearm. But at the time, she could only cry.“That was the moment that I was like, This is fucked up. This is just wrong, that I have to sit here and cry in the emergency room because someone is incompetent with my body.” She found that every health concern she brought to doctors might be taken as a referendum, in some way, on her body size. “If I stubbed my toe or whatever, they’d just say ‘Lose weight.’ ” She began to notice all the times she’d be in a waiting room and find that every chair had arms. She realized that if she was having a surgical procedure, she’d need to buy herself a plus-size gown—or else submit to being covered with a bedsheet when the nurses realized that nothing else would fit. At one appointment, for the removal of a cancerous skin lesion on her back, Barb’s health-care team tried rolling her onto her side while she was under anesthesia, and accidentally let her slip. When she woke, she found a laceration to her breast and bruises on her arm.Barb grew angrier and more direct about her needs—You’ll have to find me a different chair, she started saying to receptionists. Many others shared her rage. Activists had long decried the cruel treatment of people with obesity: The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance had existed, for example, in one form or another, since 1969; the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination had been incorporated in 1991. But in the early 2000s, the ideas behind this movement began to wend their way deeper into academia, and they soon gained some purchase with the public.In 1999, when Rebecca Puhl arrived at Yale to work with Kelly Brownell toward her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, she’d given little thought to weight-based discrimination. But Brownell had received a grant to research the topic, and he put Puhl on the project. “She basically created a field,” Brownell said. While he focused on the dark seductions of our food environment, Puhl studied size discrimination, and how it could be treated as a health condition of its own. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the proportion of adults who said they’d experienced discrimination on account of their height or weight increased by two-thirds, going up to 12 percent. Puhl and others started citing evidence that this form of discrimination wasn’t merely a source of psychic harm, but also of obesity itself. Studies found that the experience of weight discrimination is associated with overeating, and with the risk of weight gain over time.Puhl’s approach took for granted that being very fat could make you sick. Others attacked the very premise of a “healthy weight”: People do not have any fundamental need, they argued, morally or medically, to strive for smaller bodies as an end in itself. They called for resistance to the ideology of anti-fatness, with its profit-making arms in health care and consumer goods. The Association for Size Diversity and Health formed in 2003; a year later, dozens of scholars working on weight-related topics joined together to create the academic field of fat studies.[Read: Why scientists can’t agree on whether it’s unhealthy to be overweight]Some experts were rethinking their advice on food and diet. At UC Davis, a physiologist named Lindo Bacon who had struggled to overcome an eating disorder had been studying the effects of “intuitive eating,” which aims to promote healthy, sustainable behavior without fixating on what you weigh or how you look. Bacon’s mentor at the time was Judith Stern—the obesity expert who in 1995 proposed that any FDA adviser who voted against approving dexfenfluramine “ought to be shot.” By 2001, Bacon, who uses they/them pronouns, had received their Ph.D. and finished a rough draft of a book, Health at Every Size, which drew inspiration from a broader movement by that name among health-care practitioners. Bacon struggled to find a publisher. “I have a stack of well over 100 rejections,” they told me.But something shifted in the ensuing years. In 2007, Bacon got a different response, and the book was published. Health at Every Size became a point of entry for a generation of young activists and, for a time, helped shape Americans’ understanding of obesity.As the size-diversity movement grew, its values were taken up—or co-opted—by Big Business. Dove had recently launched its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which included plus-size women. (Ad Age later named it the best ad campaign of the 21st century.) People started talking about “fat shaming” as something to avoid. The heightened sensitivity started showing up in survey data, too. In 2010, fewer than half of U.S. adults expressed support for giving people with obesity the same legal protections from discrimination offered to people with disabilities. In 2015, that rate had risen to three-quarters.In Bacon’s view, the 2000s and 2010s were glory years. “People came together and they realized that they’re not alone, and they can start to be critical of the ideas that they’ve been taught,” Bacon told me. “We were on this marvelous path of gaining more credibility for the whole Health at Every Size movement, and more awareness.”But that sense of unity proved short-lived; the movement soon began to splinter. Black women have the highest rates of obesity, and disproportionately high rates of associated health conditions. Yet according to Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Harvard Medical School, Black patients with obesity get lower-quality care than white patients with obesity. “Even amongst Medicaid beneficiaries, we see differences in who is getting access to therapies,” she told me. “I think this is built into the system.”That system was exactly what Bacon and the Health at Every Size movement had set out to reform. The problem, as they saw it, was not so much that Black people lacked access to obesity medicine, but that, as Bacon and the Black sociologist Sabrina Strings argued in a 2020 article, Black women have been “specifically targeted” for weight loss, which Bacon and Strings saw as a form of racism. But members of the fat-acceptance movement pointed out that their own most visible leaders, including Bacon, were overwhelmingly white. “White female dietitians have helped steal and monetize the body positive movement,” Marquisele Mercedes, a Black activist and public-health Ph.D. student, wrote in September 2020. “And I’m sick of it.”Tensions over who had the standing to speak, and on which topics, boiled over. In 2022, following allegations that Bacon had been exploitative and condescending toward Black colleagues, the Association for Size Diversity and Health expelled them from its ranks and barred them from attending its events. (“They were accusing me of taking center stage and not appropriately deferring to marginalized people,” Bacon told me. “That’s never been true.”)As the movement succumbed to in-fighting, its momentum with the public stalled. If attitudes about fatness among the general public had changed during the 2000s and 2010s, it was only to a point. The idea that some people can indeed be “fit but fat,” though backed up by research, has always been a tough sell. Although Americans had become less inclined to say they valued thinness, measures of their implicit attitudes seemed fairly stable. Outside of a few cities such as San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, new body-size-discrimination laws were never passed. (Puhl has been testifying regularly in support of the same proposed bill in Massachusetts since 2007, to no avail.) And, as always, obesity rates themselves kept going up.In the meantime, thinness was coming back into fashion. In the spring of 2022, Kim Kardashian—whose “curvy” physique has been a media and popular obsession—boasted about crash-dieting in advance of the Met Gala. A year later, the model and influencer Felicity Hayward warned Vogue Business that “plus-size representation has gone backwards.” In March of this year, the singer Lizzo, whose body pride has long been central to her public persona, told The New York Times that she’s been trying to lose weight. “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.Among the many other dramatic effects of the GLP-1 drugs, they may well have released a store of pent-up social pressure to lose weight. If ever there was a time to debate that impulse, and to question its origins and effects, it would be now. But Puhl told me that no one can even agree on which words are inoffensive. The medical field still uses obesity, as a description of a diagnosable disease. But many activists despise that phrase—some spell it with an asterisk in place of the e—and propose instead to reclaim fat. Everyone seems to agree on the most important, central fact: that we should be doing everything we can to limit weight stigma. But that hasn’t been enough to stop the arguing.7Not long before my visit to Orlando in October, Barb had asked her endocrinologist to switch her from Trulicity to Mounjaro, because she’d heard it was more effective. (This, too, was covered under Medicaid.) A few weeks later, Barb blogged about the feeling of being stuck—physically stuck—inside her body. “Anyone who has been immobilized by fat and then freed, understands my sense of amazement that I can walk without a walker and not ride the scooter in the store,” she wrote. “Two years ago, all I could do was wait to die. I never thought I would be released from my prison of fat.” Barb has been a frequent visitor to Disney World, but until recently she needed an electric scooter to navigate the park. (Courtesy of Barb Herrera) In all that time when she could barely move, of all the places that she couldn’t really go, Disney World stood out. Barb is the sort of person who holds many fascinations—meditation, 1980s lesbian politics, the rock band Queen—but Disney may be chief among them. She has a Tinker Bell tattoo on her calf, and a trio of Mickey Mouse balloons on her shoulder. Her wallet shows the plus-size villain Ursula, from The Little Mermaid. “It’s just a place where you can go and be treated beautifully,” she said. “No matter who you are, no matter what country you’re from, no matter what language you speak. It’s just wonderful and beautiful.”She’d been raised in the theme park, more or less: Her mother got a job there in the 1970s, and that meant Barb could go for free—which she did as often as she could, almost from the time that it first opened, and for decades after. She was at Disney when Epcot opened in 1982, just weeks before she gave birth to her first child. Later on she helped produce a book about where to eat at Disney if you’re vegetarian, and published tips for how to get around the parks—and navigate the seating for their rides—whether you’re “Pooh-size” or “Baloo-size.” She worked at Disney, too, first as an independent tour guide and photographer, then as a phone operator for the resorts. “They used to pull me off of the telephones to go test new rides to see how large people could do on them,” she told me.But lately she’d only watched the park’s events on livestream. The last time she’d gone in person, in 2021, she was using a scooter for mobility. “I dream of one day walking at Disney World once again,” she’d written on her blog. So we called a car and headed over.Barb was exhilarated—so was I—when we strolled into the multistory lobby of the Animal Kingdom Lodge, with its shiny floors, vaulted ceilings, indoor suspension bridge, and 16-foot, multicolored Igbo Ijele mask. Barb bought a pair of Minnie Mouse ears at the gift shop, and kibitzed for a while with the cashier. Before, she would have had to ask me to go and get the ears on her behalf, she said, so she wouldn’t have to maneuver through the store on wheels. We walked down the stairs—we walked down the stairs, Barb observed with wonderment—to get breakfast at a restaurant called Boma. “Welcome, welcome, welcome! Have a Boma-tastic breakfast!” the host said.Barb relished being in the lodge again, and had lots to say, to me and everyone. “My mom was a cast member for 42 years,” she informed our server at one point. Even just that fact was a reminder of how much Disney World, and the people in it, had evolved during her lifetime. When her mom started to gain weight, Barb remembered, her manager demanded that she go on a diet. “They didn’t even make a costume bigger than a 16,” Barb said. As Americans got bigger, that policy had to be abandoned. “They needed people to work,” she said, with a glance around the restaurant, where kids and parents alike were squeezing into seats, not all of which looked entirely sufficient. It was easy to imagine what the crowd at Boma might have looked like 20 years ago, when the restaurant first opened, and when the adult obesity rate was just half of what it is today.“I feel smaller than a lot of these people, which is really interesting,” Barb said. “I don’t even know if I am, but I feel like it. And that is surreal.”Things feel surreal these days to just about anyone who has spent years thinking about obesity. At 71, after more than four decades in the field, Thomas Wadden now works part-time, seeing patients just a few days a week. But the arrival of the GLP-1 drugs has kept him hanging on for a few more years, he said. “It’s too much of an exciting period to leave obesity research right now.”[Read: How obesity became a disease]His bluegrass buddy, Kelly Brownell, stepped down from his teaching and administrative responsibilities last July. “I see the drugs as having great benefit,” Brownell told me, even as he quickly cited the unknowns: whether the drugs’ cost will be overwhelming, or if they’ll be unsafe or ineffective after long-term use. “There’s also the risk that attention will be drawn away from certain changes that need to be made to address the problem,” he said. When everyone is on semaglutide or tirzepatide, will the soft-drink companies—Brownell’s nemeses for so many years—feel as if a burden has been lifted? “My guess is the food industry is probably really happy to see these drugs come along,” he said. They’ll find a way to reach the people who are taking GLP‑1s, with foods and beverages in smaller portions, maybe. At the same time, the pressures to cut back on where and how they sell their products will abate.For Dariush Mozaffarian, the nutritionist and cardiologist at Tufts, the triumph in obesity treatment only highlights the abiding mystery of why Americans are still getting fatter, even now. Perhaps one can lay the blame on “ultraprocessed” foods, he said. Maybe it’s a related problem with our microbiomes. Or it could be that obesity, once it takes hold within a population, tends to reproduce itself through interactions between a mother and a fetus. Others have pointed to increasing screen time, how much sleep we get, which chemicals are in the products that we use, and which pills we happen to take for our many other maladies. “The GLP-1s are just a perfect example of how poorly we understand obesity,” Mozaffarian told me. “Any explanation of why they cause weight loss is all post-hoc hand-waving now, because we have no idea. We have no idea why they really work and people are losing weight.”The new drugs—and the “new understanding of obesity” that they have supposedly occasioned—could end up changing people’s attitudes toward body size. But in what ways? When the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease in 2013, Rebecca Puhl told me, some thought “it might reduce stigma, because it was putting more emphasis on the uncontrollable factors that contribute to obesity.” Others guessed that it would do the opposite, because no one likes to be “diseased.” Already people on these drugs are getting stigmatized twice over: first for the weight at which they started, and then again for how they chose to lose it.Barb herself has been evangelizing for her current medications with as much fervor as she showed for fen-phen. She has a blog devoted to her experience with GLP-1 drugs, called Health at Any Cost. As we stood up from our breakfast in the Animal Kingdom Lodge, Barb checked her phone and saw a text from her daughter Meghann, who had started on tirzepatide a couple of months before Barb did. “ ‘Thirty-five pounds down,’ ” Barb read aloud. “ ‘Medium top. Extra-large leggings, down from 4X’ … She looks like the child I knew. When she was so big, she looked so different.”In November, Barb’s son, Tristan, started on tirzepatide too. She attributes his and Meghann’s struggles to their genes. Later that month, when she was out at Meghann’s house in San Antonio for Thanksgiving, she sent me a photo of the three of them together—“the Tirzepatide triplets.”She’d always worried that her kids might be doomed to experience the same chronic conditions that she has. All she could do before was tell them to “stay active.” Now she imagines that this chain might finally be broken. “Is the future for my progeny filled with light and the joy of not being fat?” she wrote in a blog post last fall. Barb at home in Orlando in April. Since starting on GLP-1 drugs two years ago, she has lost more than 200 pounds. (Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic) Barb’s energy was still limited, and on the day we visited Disney World, she didn’t yet feel ready to venture out much past the lodge. Before we went back to her house, I pressed her on the limits of this fantasy about her kids’ and grandkids’ lives. How could she muster so much optimism, given all the false miracles that she’d experienced before? She’d gone on fen-phen and ended up with heart damage. She’d had a gastric

Photographs by Gordon ParksIam the granddaughter of domestic workers. My maternal grandmother was Luretha Little, an only child, who left her parents behind in North Carolina, and then her husband and two young sons in Virginia in search of freedom in New Jersey, where her sons eventually joined her and where my mother was born in 1955. In Newark, Luretha and her second husband, Elijah Griffin, had four more children. They ran a janitorial business, cleaning the offices of white doctors in Woodbridge and white scientists in New Brunswick. Sometimes they brought their children and put them to work: the twin boys swept the floors, and my mother dusted desks and polished ashtrays. My paternal grandmother, Hilda Ramdoo, was nicknamed Dolly because she was a pretty baby. One of nine children born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, she had seven of her own. By the time my father was an adult, his mother had temporarily left her husband, Antonio Tillet, and remaining six children to work in Caracas, where she cleaned the homes of the Venezuelan elite; she later went to Boston, where her entire family eventually joined her, and where I was born in 1975.I think a lot about these two women and their countless hours of labor in the homes or offices of others. Though they were separated by race, nationality, and age, because of their gender and class they were relegated to the same job. But they also had full lives. Seven children each. Luretha loved Mahalia and Motown. Dolly was one of the first women to start a Carnival band in Trinidad. They were pious and proper and quick-tongued and outspoken. I think a lot about what existed for them beyond work when I look at Gordon Parks’s most memorable image: the 1942 photograph he initially labeled Washington D.C. Government Charwoman, but renamed American Gothic during the revolutionary 1960s.More than half a century later, Parks recounted making this first portrait of Ella Watson, the 59-year-old African American cleaning woman who, like him, worked at the Farm Security Administration offices in Washington, D.C. “So it happened that, in one of the government’s most sacred strongholds,” he wrote, “I set up my camera for my first professional photograph.”“On the wall,” he continued, “was a huge American flag hanging from the ceiling to the floor.” Parks asked Watson “to stand before it, placed the mop in one hand, a broom in the other, then instructed her to look into the lens.”This capture of Watson at work—wearing a neatly pressed polka-dotted puffed-sleeve dress and wire-rimmed glasses, her hair parted to the side, with a straw broom and rag mop on either side of her and a slightly out-of-focus American flag hanging behind her—is now so familiar to me that I don’t remember when I first saw it. But I didn’t know until recently that it is what Parks considered his “first” professional photograph, setting him on the path to becoming one of the most innovative and influential photographers of all time. Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs Ella Watson, a government chairwoman, leaves for work at 4:30pm. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) In July and August 1942, Parks took more than 90 photographs of Watson, her family, and her community, in a project that rejected long-standing caricatures of Black women as mammies or subservient maids. More than a decade before hundreds of Black women domestic workers helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott, Parks’s series with Watson revealed Black domestics as they often were: patriotic, political, and pious.In his memoir, A Choice of Weapons, Parks recalled entering the FSA offices for the first time, walking “confidently down the corridor, following the arrows to my destination, sensing history all around me, feeling knowledge behind every door I passed.” Roy Stryker, the head of the FSA’s Historical Section, sensing that Parks’s naivete would not serve him or his future subjects well, encouraged him to leave his camera behind and get to know the city by going for a bus ride, taking in a movie, shopping at a drugstore or a department store, or dining at local restaurants. “I wanted to kill everyone,” Parks said about those experiences. “I’ve never been so mad.” Unlike in Saint Paul, where he came of age, or even his more recent home, Chicago, in D.C., he faced the harsh reality of the district’s strict segregation laws and was denied service or entry everywhere he went. Furious, Parks told Stryker that he needed to document this story of American racism and then plotted his plan in bold strokes. “I wanted to photograph every rotten discrimination in the city, and show the world how evil Washington was,” Parks said. “I had the biggest, vaguest ideas in the world.” After making it clear that such a project would require him to hire all of Life magazine’s photographers for the rest of their lives, Stryker encouraged Parks to focus on and follow one person to achieve his goals. Stryker indicated a woman who was mopping the hallway floor nearby. “Go have a talk with her before you go home this evening,” he said. “See what she has to say about life and things. You might find her interesting.” (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Born in late March 1883 in Washington, D.C., Ella Watson had been a domestic for most of her life by the time she met Parks. In 1898, at age 15, she left school and later that year found a job ironing at the Frazee Laundry in Washington. She worked intermittently, listing “maid” and “laundress” as her employment on the census until she found a temporary position as a custodian at the State Department in 1919. The following year, she doubled up, working as a caretaker in a white family’s home and cleaning another federal agency building. She managed to secure steady employment at the Post Office Department for most of the 1920s, then moved to the Treasury Department (where the FSA was also located) in 1929; she remained there until 1944. “I came to find out a very significant thing,” Parks later remembered. Watson “had moved into the [office] building at the same time, she said, as the [white] woman who was now a notary public. They came there with the same education, the same mental facilities and equipment, and she was now scrubbing this woman’s room every evening.”I have always wondered whether Parks saw parts of his biography in Watson’s story. Long before he worked for the railroad, much less became a professional photographer, a teenage Gordon Parks was homeless in his new city of Saint Paul. He worked weekends at his boardinghouse to make ends meet, washing dishes and mopping floors. A few years later, like millions of Americans during the Depression, he was destitute again. Having lost all his belongings on an earlier trip to Chicago, a desperate Parks got a gig at the Hotel Southland. Because of his race, this run-down establishment barred him from renting one of the rooms he was responsible for cleaning.Having to clean for the hotel’s white, working-class, and almost always drunk guests brought out the worst in him. The Southland was filled with a “bad breath of smoke, alcohol, sour bodies and human excrement” and “pickpockets, alcoholics, bums, addicts, perverts, panhandlers,” and the only way Parks could survive was to “hold my own here, where profanity meant prestige and politeness invited abuse.” Hating every day of his short-lived experience there, Parks concluded, “It was a harsh and ugly time,” marked mainly by his “longing for the time when I could get into a tub of hot water and soak out the smell of the place.”I do not know if Parks divulged his past to Watson, but she shared much with him. “Would you allow me to photograph you?” he awkwardly asked her one early-summer evening in 1942. “In an old dress like this?” she humbly replied. Soon Parks had his most enduring photograph, but he realized he knew little of his subject beyond the image. When he approached her later to ask if he could continue to document her and learn more about her life, Watson joked that it might take some time because she was a grandmother. She then told a life story that sounded to Parks like “a bad dream.” By the time he met her, her husband had died (in 1927), and she was raising her adopted teenage daughter and her adopted daughter’s nieces and nephews. Watson, a single mother and the sole provider for the family, was left to survive on an annual wage of $1,080. And she knew she was locked permanently into this status.Whether Parks consciously identified with Watson as a domestic remains unclear. But in the actual photographs, we can see his identification with and respect for her as a laborer in unexpected ways. Rather than remove all evidence of himself in the portraits of Watson cleaning the offices, he subtly included traces of his photography equipment. Parks established a reciprocity between their lives and their labor. He knew it was not a one-to-one correlation. “By comparison,” he reflected after learning of Watson’s hardships, “my experiences were akin to a peaceful afternoon.” The images were trenchant critiques of the limited economic opportunities available to Black people, particularly Black women in Jim Crow America, while they also told Watson’s story with visual nuance and depth. Washington, DC. August 1942. Ella Watson cleaning after regular working hours. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs. Ella Watson, a government chairwoman, reading the Bible to her house-hold. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Stryker immediately understood the disruptive power of Government Charwoman. Balking after Parks showed it to him, he said, “Well, you’re catching on, but that picture could get us all fired.” Aware that southern members of Congress had already complained about the FSA’s publishing images of Black people impoverished in the segregated South, Stryker encouraged Parks to continue documenting Watson.The most dominant image of Black domestic workers in mainstream America at the time was that of a mammy, a Black woman who happily served at the whims of white employers. By 1941, the image had peaked: Hattie McDaniel won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Ruth “Mammy,” a formerly enslaved woman on the Tara plantation and house servant to Scarlett O’Hara in the pro-Confederate movie Gone With the Wind. Years later, when a friend criticized her for “playing so many servant parts, or ‘handkerchief heads’ as they came to be called,” McDaniel responded, “Hell, I’d rather play a maid than be one.”Although Parks was not alone in creating a counternarrative to racist stereotypes, his image remains one of the most enduring. Two years before Parks arrived in the capital, his literary hero Richard Wright sent his agent a manuscript titled Slave Market (later renamed Black Hope), about the plight of Black housemaids. Wright hoped the novel might “reveal in a symbolic manner the potentially strategic position, socially and politically, which women occupy in the world today.” But he never published the book, and another eight years would pass before Lutie Johnson, a domestic worker turned blues singer, would appear in print in Ann Petry’s social-realist novel The Street.Parks never saw Watson as just a symbol. Through sustained documentation of her life, the civil-rights aesthetic he pursued and perfected for the rest of his career took form. In that brief encounter with Watson, her friends, and her family, Parks realized his capacity to depict Black people in his art the way he knew them in the world: as multidimensional, multitudinous, and agents of social change.He achieved this, in part, through a swap. Parks later admitted to having Grant Wood’s American Gothic in mind when he placed Watson in a pose similar to that of both figures in Wood’s 1930 painting. Parks likely saw the painting—now one of the most recognizable of 20th-century American art—during a train layover in Chicago in 1937. Unlike the sharp social commentary of the FSA photographs, Wood’s painting was both bucolic and nostalgic. The obvious middle-classness harkened back to an age of prosperity and stability before the Great Depression. “What does matter is whether or not these faces are true to American life,” Wood wrote about his models in a 1941 letter, “and reveal something about it.”Recently, I went to see Wood’s American Gothic on a lark. I had seen the painting many times as one of the many tourists who flock to the American wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, looked at it from various angles, and debated its import as kitsch or haute culture. But this time, I had Parks and Watson in my head, and I found myself less interested in the farmer and his daughter (many people mistake the woman for a wife) and more invested in Parks’s transformation of a double portrait into a single one.In Parks’s version, Watson stood in for both figures. In Wood’s painting, the division of labor falls along traditional gender lines. The older man and the younger woman are outdoors, and the pitchfork is the main clue to their labor. The farmer uses it daily, making it a crucial part of his routine and work, as the painting suggests, in public. The young woman’s gaze suggests a dependency on him, and her kitchen garb indicates that she does not work alongside him but might take care of the home. By replacing those two figures with Watson, a Black cleaning woman, Parks troubled the notions of gender, race, and work. As Watson cleaned those stairwells and offices in the after-hours, the wartime bureaucracy of the FSA became a domestic space, and women’s labor was no longer unseen.I am drawn to those photographs that fully refuse Watson’s invisibility and revel in her interiority. Parks travels with her far beyond the office building and witnesses her different types of emotional, familial, and intergenerational labor: her preparing to go to and returning from work; her feeding and dressing her grandchildren, and combing their hair. Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs. Ella Watson receives anointment from Reverend Clara Smith during the Flower bowl demonstration, a service held once a year at the St Martin’s Spiritual church. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs. Ella Watson, a government chairwoman, with three grandchildren and her adopted daughter. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Interspersed are moments in which Watson created an alternative to the racism she experienced at work and a curative to her daily grind. As poignant as but less popular than her overt dissent in front of the American flag in the most famous photograph is her embrace of religious ritual and her exercising her right to rest. Tenderness is on display when Watson’s grandchild naps midafternoon or when we see her silhouette projected on the mirror behind her bedroom altar. Eyes closed, head down, Watson appears in a solo portrait again, but this time in prayer. Parks helps us see how, despite her economic poverty, surrounded by rows of neatly lined-up statues and candles, Watson made her home a sanctuary, a place where she, and maybe even he, for a time, could connect to something far better than the segregated country into which they both were born.“I was in my very late teens when I was first made aware of the images,” Ella Watson’s great-granddaughter Rosslyn Samuels told me in an interview. “And I didn’t grasp the magnitude of it until my later years, because, to me, she was just Grandma.” When she saw Parks’s photographs, she said, “I thought, Oh, someone took professional pictures of her. I regret not knowing about them when she was alive, because she and I shared a bedroom, and we talked about everything.” Knowing Watson only as a retiree meant that Samuels’s primary memories of her great-grandmother are more like the photographs Parks took outside the office, the large majority of moments he documented: Watson as a loving, pious, nurturing Black woman who seemed to delight in looking after those she loved.And here, Watson still inspires. “I get an overwhelming feeling when I look at Parks’s photographs of her now,” Samuels revealed. “It’s just like, ‘Wow.’ But … I’m not surprised, because she was always so big to us. She had that impact on a lot of people. We revered her. And it’s not like she commanded it; she just had a certain effect on people.”Fortunately, one of them was a 29-year-old photographer named Gordon Parks. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) This article has been excerpted from “’She Was Always So Big to Us’: Ella Watson as Style and Substance," an essay by Salamishah Tillet, that appears in Gordon Parks's new book American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson.

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.As the Israel-Hamas war continues, breathless headlines sometimes conceal more than they reveal.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic. David A. Graham: “The Stormy Daniels testimony spotlights Trump’s misogyny.” The politics of fear itself When conservative parents revolt Waiting for DetailsIn March, CNN reported that “the Israelis have ‘basically accepted’ a six-week ceasefire proposal in Gaza,” per a U.S. official. Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that Hamas said it had “accepted an Egyptian-Qatari cease-fire proposal.” Each of these claims quickly spread across the internet, fueling arguments among partisans around the world and raising hopes among both Palestinians and Israelis. Of course, as anyone following the conflict in Gaza knows, the fighting has not ended. These pseudo-cease-fires are far from the only instance of such whiplash between the headlines and reality in recent months—just recall the breathless news coverage surrounding Iran’s strike on Israel and the Israeli response, both of which were cast as a prelude to regional and possibly world war before fizzling into nothing of the kind.Confused? Trying to figure out how to tell what’s true and what’s not? You’re not alone. I struggle with the challenge too. Here are four points about the cease-fire talks that guide my own reporting, and help me untangle where things stand.1. As they negotiate, both parties are attempting to shape international media coverage—and their statements should be read with this in mind. In professional sports leagues, before consequential trades or player signings, there are often a flurry of leaks to media outlets about potential contract terms or trade packages. Most of these turn out to be false. This is how Aaron Judge, the superstar captain of the New York Yankees, was momentarily reported to have signed with the San Francisco Giants in 2022. Why are so many of these reports wrong? Sometimes, they reflect genuine offers from the midst of a fluid negotiation; other times they are an attempt by one side to increase their leverage.International reporting is not sports reporting, but it is subject to similar dynamics. In the case of Israel and Hamas, both sides are selectively sharing information in order to shape press coverage, attempting to present themselves as reasonable and their opponent as recalcitrant. In some cases, this can lead to certain media outlets getting ahead of the story or being spun by those advancing an agenda. That appears to be what happened yesterday, when Hamas unilaterally announced that it had “agreed to” a cease-fire, and several outlets repeated the claim without sufficient scrutiny as to what the group had actually agreed to. As The New York Times reported, it later turned out that “Hamas did not ‘accept’ a cease-fire deal so much as make a counteroffer to the proposal on the table previously blessed by the United States and Israel.” Moreover, Hamas refused to commit to releasing only living Israeli hostages, as opposed to dead ones, in the first stage of a proposed multiphase deal. Here, as elsewhere, when confronted with a sensational headline, it pays to wait for more details before assuming the initial report provides the full picture.2. Israel and Hamas aren’t the only ones negotiating—and this makes things very complicated. Israel and Hamas did not have formal relations even before they went to war in October. As a result, they have long communicated through intermediaries. Right now, cease-fire negotiations are being conducted in Cairo with the assistance of multiple outside mediators, including the United States, Egypt (which borders both Israel and Gaza), and Qatar (which hosts the Hamas political leadership). Each of these actors is providing their own proposals and compromise suggestions, which can help the parties progress but also allow them to posture by accepting a friendlier proposal from one of the external mediators than they would get from the other side. Understanding this dynamic can help you decode the headlines: There will be a deal when the story is not “Israel accepts U.S. cease-fire proposal” or “Hamas accepts Egyptian-Qatari proposal” but rather “Israel and Hamas agree to mutual cease-fire proposal.”3. Several core sticking points still need to be resolved. To know whether the parties are actually close to a deal, it helps to know why they haven’t gotten to one yet. In addition to Hamas’s caginess about releasing living hostages—it has yet to provide a list of those Israelis it currently holds, and appears to want to use the live ones as bargaining chips for later stages—both parties have a fundamental disagreement about whether a deal would officially end the war. Hamas insists that it must, while Israel wants to reserve the right to return to Gaza and continue pursuing Hamas’s leadership, even after a long lull in hostilities.This split over a “permanent cease-fire” might seem largely symbolic: Israel and Hamas have been at war with each other on and off for more than a decade, and that won’t change based on what a piece of paper says. But symbolism matters. Both parties—and in particular, their political leadership—want to be able to declare victory when a deal is signed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in thrall to far-right coalition partners and dead in the polls, doesn’t want to look like he conceded to Hamas. Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, desperately wants to appear to have achieved something after all the devastation that Hamas and its October 7 massacre brought upon the people of Gaza. Being able to emerge from hiding and declare that he’d outlasted the vaunted Israeli military would accomplish that.More substantively, Israelis are divided over whether the overriding goal of the current war should be destroying Hamas (in which case Israel cannot disengage until the group’s final battalions are defeated) or returning the hostages (in which case Israel could end this war now and fight Hamas another day). Israel’s leadership has so far refused to choose between these two goals, but the moment of decision seems to be arriving.4. There is no agreement, but there are negotiations and they are at a pivotal point. Yesterday, Hamas made a negotiating counteroffer, then accepted its own counteroffer. That is obviously not how a bilateral agreement works, but it is evidence that negotiations are advancing. In response, Israel announced yesterday that it would send a new delegation to Cairo to continue talks. CIA director William Burns is reportedly personally on site to help facilitate a deal. At the same time, Israel has begun an operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where it says Hamas’s leadership is hiding among more than 1 million sheltering Palestinians.President Joe Biden has warned the Israelis against a full-scale operation in Rafah, which is partly why the current one is limited in scope—it began with an evacuation order for 100,000 civilians, leaving the rest in place while Israel maneuvers in a smaller geographic area. This move undoubtedly puts further pressure on Hamas, but it also hastens the moment when Israel will have to decide whether to press forward into the rest of Rafah, potentially breaking with the Biden administration. This prospect in turn increases the pressure on Israel itself to reach some sort of agreement. Although the outcome of these precipitous events is uncertain, an inflection point is fast approaching—and the time may come once again to practice patience as the incomplete headlines roll in.Related: The right-wing Israeli campaign to resettle Gaza (From 2023) What did top Israeli war officials really say about Gaza? Today’s News The judge in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial denied his lawyers’ request for a mistrial during Stormy Daniels’s testimony about her alleged sexual encounter with the former president and a hush-money payment. TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, sued the U.S. federal government over recent legislation that mandates the sale of TikTok, claiming that the law violates the company’s First Amendment rights. Vladimir Putin was inaugurated for his fifth term as the president of Russia in a ceremony that the U.S. and many European nations boycotted. Evening Read Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty. Enough With Saving the HoneybeesBy Ellen Cushing In 2022, at least 18 states enacted bee-related legislation. Last year, a cryptocurrency launched with the intention of raising “awareness and support for bee conservation.” If you search Etsy right now for “save the bees,” you’ll be rewarded with thousands of things to buy. Bees and Thank You, a food truck in suburban Boston, funds bee sanctuaries and gives out a packet of wildflower seeds—good for the bees!—with every grilled cheese sandwich it sells. A company in the United Kingdom offers a key ring containing a little bottle of chemicals that can purportedly “revive” an “exhausted bee” should you encounter one, “so it can continue its mission pollinating planet Earth.” All of the above is surprising for maybe a few different reasons, but here’s a good place to start: Though their numbers have fluctuated, honeybees are not in trouble. Other bees are. But the movement’s poster child, biggest star, and attention hound is not at risk of imminent extinction, and never has been. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic The conjoined twins who refused to be “fixed” “Ukraine has changed too much to compromise with Russia,” Illia Ponomarenko argues. Being an ambassador in Washington keeps getting harder. James Parker: “Some late-breaking adjustments to my new autobiography” Culture Break Max Watch (or skip). Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show (out now on Max) is a new unscripted show about the comedian’s life that may lean too much into voyeurism, Hannah Giorgis writes.Read. A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria, by Caroline Crampton, explores the pervasiveness of health anxiety.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.

Donald Trump has often loved to talk about his sexual prowess. He boasted to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush about grabbing women’s crotches non-consensually. He called the New York Post and begged them to run a headline bragging that his then-girlfriend, and later-second wife, Marla Maples, considered their relationship the “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had!” He bragged that he had so much sex that avoiding venereal diseases was “my personal Vietnam.”But the former president is suddenly shy about sex this week. It’s the third week of his trial in Manhattan on charges that he falsified business records to cover up hush money paid to a woman who says she had sex with him. That woman is Stormy Daniels, a porn actor and director, and today she testified in the trial, much to Trump’s consternation.[Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s misogyny is on trial in New York]At the start of proceedings today, Trump’s lawyers fiercely objected to Daniels’s presence—particularly to the danger that she would divulge “any details” of sex between the two. Trump also angrily posted and then deleted a missive on Truth Social about Daniels testifying. (He denies that any sex occurred.) Daniels has indeed been nauseatingly graphic about the encounter in other forums, but a prosecutor assured Judge Juan Merchan that the witness would not describe any “genitalia.”And she did not, though she did at one point describe the position in which she says they had sex. Trump’s lawyers, and sometimes Merchan of his own volition, repeatedly objected to prosecutors’ lines of questioning or to Daniels’s answers. The vibes were weird all around. Daniels had to be repeatedly asked to speak more slowly, by both the prosecutor and the judge. Reporters in the courtroom observed that Merchan seemed more on edge than at any other point in the trial so far.What Daniels described was less graphic and less prurient but perhaps more repulsive and more revealing about Trump. My colleague Quinta Jurecic wrote at the outset of the case that the real subject of the trial was Trump’s misogyny, raising the question: “Is this really the kind of man you want to be your president?” The day’s testimony was a window into just what kind of man that is, one dripping with sexual entitlement and presumption.[David A. Graham: Judge Merchan is out of good options]Daniels recounted a dinner appointment with Trump in Lake Tahoe in 2006 that she thought was about either socializing or business; it dawned on her too late that the goal for him was sex.One clear implication from Daniels’s testimony was that for Trump, this was nothing unusual. He simply expected that if a woman was around him, he was getting laid—not without consent, exactly, but not entirely with it, either. There was no conversation, Daniels testified: “I didn’t say anything at all.” After all, as Trump said in the Access Hollywood tape, “when you’re a star they let you do it.” In the same tape, he bitterly recalled hitting on another woman unsuccessfully. The failure rankled because it ran against his usual pattern.The two met at a golf tournament. After an initial introduction, Trump’s bodyguard approached her and asked if she’d have dinner with Trump. She demurred, profanely, but came around because she wanted to get out of another obligation. Besides, her publicist asked her, “What could possibly go wrong?”Daniels was directed to meet Trump in his penthouse room. This should have been the first sign of trouble: She said he met her wearing silk or satin pajamas that reminded her of Hugh Hefner. She asked him to get dressed in normal clothes, and he did.[Read: The cases against Trump—a guide]Their conversation over dinner sounds, bluntly, to be weird. Among the topics were how often Daniels was tested for STDs, and what protocols were for filming (her company always required condoms). In what maybe should have been another warning sign, they also talked about Trump’s sleeping arrangements with his third and current wife, Melania (Daniels said he said they didn’t even sleep in the same room).At one point, Daniels scolded Trump. “Are you always this rude? Are you always this arrogant and pompous?” she asked. (No one would have to ask today.) “Like you don’t even know how to have a conversation.” But she also testified that unlike many other people, he seemed less interested in the salacious side of the porn business and more curious about the financials. “He was very interested in a lot of the business aspects of it, which I thought was very cool,” she said. “These were very thought-out business questions."Eventually, Daniels was ready to head out and went to the bathroom. But when she emerged, she found Trump on the bed, in a t-shirt and boxers. He was between her and the door. She moved to leave, but he blocked her—not in a threatening manner, she said, though she also noted that he was larger than her and she was aware of the power dynamic. The next thing she knew, they were having sex.[Sophie Gilbert: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]Trump had gotten what he wanted. The two kept in touch for years, with him repeatedly dangling but never delivering on the prospect of Daniels appearing on The Apprentice. She said he never asked her to keep quiet about their hook-up, though she also didn’t discuss it widely, she said, because she was ashamed. It was only later, as Trump was running for president in 2016, that her hush-money deal was arranged.Last year, my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote that a second Trump presidency would produce four years of unchecked misogyny. “I don’t believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway,” she wrote. “The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function.” Daniels’s account of her encounter with him showed exactly how that can work. It’s not that Trump bore any malice toward Daniels (that came later); it’s that she mattered to him only as a vehicle to sex.By now, Trump has gotten a great deal more than he expected or wanted that day in his Tahoe penthouse. Following a lunch break today, his attorneys argued for a mistrial on the basis of Daniels’s answers. Merchan refused but said several times that some things that came up would have been “better left unsaid.” The newly demure defendant would surely agree.

Everyone, for so long, has been worried about the honeybees. Governments, celebrities, social-media users, small businesses, multinational conglomerates—in the two decades or so since news emerged that American honeybees were disappearing, all manner of entities with a platform or a wallet have taken up and abandoned countless other causes, but they can’t quit trying to save the bees.In 2022, at least 18 states enacted bee-related legislation. Last year, a cryptocurrency launched with the intention of raising “awareness and support for bee conservation.” If you search Etsy right now for “save the bees,” you’ll be rewarded with thousands of things to buy. Bees and Thank You, a food truck in suburban Boston, funds bee sanctuaries and gives out a packet of wildflower seeds—good for the bees!—with every grilled cheese sandwich it sells. A company in the United Kingdom offers a key ring containing a little bottle of chemicals that can purportedly “revive” an “exhausted bee” should you encounter one, “so it can continue its mission pollinating planet Earth.”All of the above is surprising for maybe a few different reasons, but here’s a good place to start: Though their numbers have fluctuated, honeybees are not in trouble. Other bees are. But the movement’s poster child, biggest star, and attention hound is not at risk of imminent extinction, and never has been. “There are more honeybees on the planet now than there probably ever have been in the history of honeybees,” Rich Hatfield, a biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, told me. “They are in no threat of going endangered. It’s not an issue.”The idea that honeybees need our help is one of our most curiously persistent cultural myths. It is well intended. But it is also unhelpful: a distraction from more urgent biodiversity problems, and an object lesson in the limits of modern environmentalism and the seductiveness of modern consumerism. That the misconception has survived for so long may tell us less about bees than it does about the species that has, for centuries, adored, influenced, and exploited them more than any other. “Save the bees” rhetoric has turned them into something unspoiled, a miracle of mother nature’s ingenious machinery. But everything about the modern American honeybee has been shaped by humans, including its sustained existence.A true truth about the bees: The modal American honeybee is, essentially, a farm animal—part of a $200-billion-a-year industry that’s regulated by the USDA and is as sophisticated and professionalized as any other segment of the sprawling system that gets food on our plates. The nation’s largest beekeeping operation, Adee Honey Farms, has more than 80,000 colonies, facilities in five states, and nearly 100 employees. Its bees, and those at other large-scale apiaries, do produce honey, but more and more, the real money is in what the industry calls “pollination services”: the renting-out of bees to fertilize the farms of Big Ag, which have seen their indigenous pollinators decline with urbanization and industrialization.Every February, right before the almond trees start blooming powdery and white across California’s San Joaquin Valley, bees from all over the country pack onto semitrucks and head west, where they participate in the largest supervised pollination event on Earth, doing their part to ensure that America’s most beloved nut makes its way again into snack packs and candy bars. Throughout the spring and early summer, they do the same for other crops—watermelons, pumpkins, cucumbers, alfalfas, onions—before heading home to the honey farm, where the most ambitious among them can expect to make a 12th of a teaspoon of the gooey, golden stuff over their lifetime. In the early 1990s, when Adee started renting out bees for industrial fertilization, that income accounted for about a third of its revenue, with honey making up the rest. Now the ratio is flipped.[Read: A uniquely French approach to environmentalism]As that transition was happening, another force threatened to rearrange the industry even more dramatically. Worker bees were flying away for pollen and never coming back, abandoning their hives’ queens and young like a lousy husband in an enduring cliché. No one could figure out why. Some blamed a common class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are toxic to bees. Others zeroed in on the stress incurred by all that trucking of beehives around the country for pollination. Maybe it was warmer winters, or malnutrition, or the parasitic Varroa mite, or a sign of the Rapture.This was not the first time bees had gone missing en masse. In 1869, and in 1918, and in 1965, farmers had reported similar phenomena, given names such as “spring dwindle” and “disappearing disease” in the scientific literature. But it was the first time that such an event reached full-scale public crisis, or that knowledge of it spread much beyond the insular world of farmers, beekeepers, entomologists, and agriculture regulators.In retrospect, it was a perfect moment for a predicament like this to effloresce into panic. Social media had recently birthed an immensely powerful way of both disseminating information and performing one’s values loudly and publicly. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s feature-length climate-change call to arms, had become one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Michael Pollan was at the peak of his powers, having just published The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which laid out the consequence and quantity of choices facing contemporary eaters. Americans were newly aware of the terrifying fragility of our food systems, and newly in possession of robust ways to talk about it. Brands were interested in aligning themselves with noncontroversial, blandly feel-good causes. Plus, humans were already primed to love bees; we have since biblical times. “We think of bees as being very pure,” Beth Daly, an anthrozoology professor at the University of Windsor, in Canada, told me. They are honey and flowers and sunshine, beauty and abundance, communitarianism and hard work.By 2007, the mystery thing making these lovely creatures go away had a scary-sounding new name: colony collapse disorder. Within a decade, bee panic was everywhere. A spate of nonfiction books warned of the imminent threat of a Fruitless Fall and A Spring Without Bees. The White House convened a task force. General Mills temporarily removed the cartoon-bee mascot from boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios, enacting a high-concept allegory meant, I guess, to stun Americans into action. The cosmetics company Burt’s Bees released a limited-edition lip-balm flavor (strawberry), some of whose proceeds went to one of the approximately gazillion honeybee-conservation nonprofits that had recently sprung up. Samuel L. Jackson gave Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds “10 pounds of bees” as a wedding gift. Laypeople started keeping backyard hives. Häagen-Dazs created an awareness-raising ice-cream flavor and funded a VR short film shot from the perspective of a bee; in it, Alex, our apian protagonist, warns that “something terrible is happening.”She (it?) was not entirely wrong. Colony collapse was an actual problem, a scientific whodunit with genuinely high stakes. Honeybees are responsible for pollinating roughly every third bite Americans eat. Scientists were correct to think back then that if colonies were to keep collapsing, our food system would need to change in painful, potentially catastrophic ways.Much more worrying, though, and more real: The population of wild bees—the non-honey-producing, non-hive-dwelling relatives of the species humans have been intent on saving—has been decreasing steadily, for years. Insects of all kinds are declining in record numbers, and their deaths will have repercussions we cannot even imagine.[Read: The illogical relationship Americans have with animals]Yet heads have been turned mostly toward the honeybee. That’s because, unlike so many other imperiled animals, honeybees are part of a huge industry quite literally invested in their survival. Apis mellifera are living things, but they are also revenue-generating assets; the thousands of people who rely on bees’ uncompensated labor to buy groceries and pay the cable bill had every incentive to figure out colony collapse. So they found better agrochemicals and bred mite-resistant bees. They gave their bees nutritional supplements, fats and proteins and minerals ground as fine as pollen and snuck into the food supply. They moved hives into atmospherically controlled warehouses. They adapted.All told, it was kind of the Y2K of environmental disasters. Not that colony collapse was a hoax, or that the panic surrounding it was an overreaction. Rather, it was an appropriate reaction—a big problem made smaller thanks to the difficult, somewhat unglamorous, behind-the-scenes labor of trained professionals with a vested interest in averting disaster. In 2019, an economist-entomologist team published a study analyzing the effects of colony collapse on the managed-pollinator industry; they found “cause for considerable optimism, at least for the economically dominant honey bee.” According to the most recent data from the USDA Census of Agriculture, honeybees have been the country’s fastest-growing livestock category since 2007. Also, very clearly, our food system has not fallen to pieces.This doesn’t mean honeybee keepers aren’t struggling—some are. But as Hatfield, the Xerces Society biologist, told me, that’s an issue for the business of honeybee keeping, not the moral and practical project of pollinator conservation. He finds a useful comparison in a different domesticated animal: chickens. “When we get bird flu,” he said, “we leave that up to USDA scientists to develop immunizations and other things to help these chickens that are suffering in these commercial chicken coops. We don’t enlist homeowners to help the chicken populations in their backyard.”In 2018, Seirian Sumner, a wasp scientist and fan, conducted a survey of 748 people, mostly in the United Kingdom, on their perceptions of various insects. She and her collaborators, she told me, “were absolutely flabbergasted” by their results: Bees are roughly as adored as butterflies and significantly more liked than wasps—their wilder cousins—which serve various important roles in ecosystem regulation, and which are in genuine, fairly precipitous decline.Sumner was born in 1974 and doesn’t recall much love for bees when she was growing up. You weren’t “buying your bee slippers and your bee socks and your bee scarf and your bee mug and everything else,” she told me. Today’s craze for bees, her research suggests, is a mutually reinforcing phenomenon. People love bees because they understand their importance as pollinators. People understand their importance as pollinators because it is easier to fund research and write magazine articles and publish children’s books and engage in multi-platform brand campaigns about animals that people are already fond of.Honeybees are, in point of fact, amazing. They have five eyes, two stomachs, and a sense of smell 50 times more sensitive than a dog’s. They do a little dance when they find good pollen and want to tell their friends about it. They are feminists, and obviously, they dress well. They produce a near-universally-liked substance, and they do not have to die to do it. Loving bees, and wanting more of them in our food system, is simple. Engaging meaningfully with the cruel, complicated reality of industrial food production, or the looming, life-extinguishing horror of climate change, is not.To save the bees is to participate in an especially appealing kind of environmental activism, one that makes solutions seem straightforward and buying stuff feel virtuous. Worried about vanishing biodiversity? Save the bees. Feeling powerless about your mandatory participation, via the consumption required to stay alive, in agriculture systems that produce so much wreckage, so much waste, so much suffering for so many living things? Save the bees. Tired of staring at the hyperobject? Save the bees. When we are grasping for ways to help, we tend to land on whatever is within arm’s reach.In the 17th century, when what is now called the American honeybee was imported from Europe, large-scale industrial agriculture did not exist. Farms were surrounded by wild flora and powered by non-machine labor, without pesticides and chemical fertilizers, which also did not exist. Bees lived, ate, and pollinated all in the same place; they built their nests in untilled soil and unchopped trees. Even if farmers could have trucked them in, they didn’t have to. But as farming changed, bees became livestock, then itinerant laborers—there to meet the needs of the industrial systems that created those needs in the first place. Their numbers have always oscillated based on our demands: In the 1940s, when sugar rationing made beekeeping extraordinarily profitable, the bee population swelled; as soon as the war was over, it fell again. In 2024, thanks to the efforts of professional beekeepers and (to a lesser extent) backyard hobbyists, they’re faring better than ever.Now the industrialized world that made, and saved, the honeybee as we know it is being called on to save other insects—the ones that really are in trouble. This will be trickier. When you ask experts what a layperson should do for all pollinators in 2024, they have a lot to say: Use fewer insecticides, inside and outside. Convert mowed lawn into habitat that can feed wild animals. Reconsider your efforts to save the honeybee—not just because it’s a diversion, but because honeybees take resources from wild bees. Buy organic, and look for food grown using agricultural practices that support beneficial insects. Get involved with efforts to count and conserve bees of all species. (The experts do not think you should buy a lip balm.)What they are getting at is … an inconvenient truth: America does have an insect-biodiversity crisis. It is old and big—much older and much bigger than colony collapse disorder—and so are the solutions to it. The best require returning our environment into something that looks much more like the place the first American honeybees encountered. Having a backyard beehive isn’t the answer to what’s ailing our ecosystem, because having a backyard is the problem. Buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate isn’t the answer, because buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate is the problem. The movement to save the honeybee is a small attempt at unwinding centuries of human intervention in our natural world, at undoing the harms of the modern food system, without having to sacrifice too much. No wonder so many of us wanted to believe.​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

When George Schappell came out as transgender in 2007, he joined a population at the center of medical and ethical controversy. Schappell was used to this. He had been born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1961 with the left side of his face, some of his skull, and a portion of his brain conjoined with those of his sister, Lori. Following doctors’ advice, their parents put them in an institution for children with intellectual disabilities.At the time, children with “birth defects” were routinely consigned to what the activist Harriet McBryde Johnson termed the “disability gulag,” a network of facilities designed in part to care for such children and in part to keep them out of the public view. Conditions could be abysmal, but even better-maintained facilities cut residents off from society and deprived them of autonomy. In their early 20s, the twins fought their way out by enlisting the help of Pennsylvania’s first lady, whose stepson was disabled.[From the September 2023 issue: The ones we sent away]As George and Lori Schappell navigated independence, the growing disability-rights movement began to allow many other people with disabilities to do the same. Their physical bodies did not fit easily into the structures of a world that was not designed to receive them. George and Lori, who died last month at 62, spent their adult lives finding their way through that world. But American society is still struggling to determine whether to accommodate bodies like theirs—bodies that fail to conform to standards of gender, ability, and even individuality.In the 1980s and early ’90s, while the Schappells were establishing their independent lives, the American public was enthralled by a procession of sensationalized operations to separate conjoined twins. These experimental procedures could be brutal. Many conjoined twins did not come apart easily; in many cases they have an odd number of limbs or organs shared between them. Patrick and Benjamin Binder, whose 1987 separation at six months made a young Ben Carson a star, both sustained profound neurological damage from the surgery and never spoke. In 1994, surgeons sacrificed newborn Amy Lakeberg to save her twin, but Angela died less than a year later, never having left the hospital. Lin and Win Htut shared a single pair of genitals; in 1984 doctors designated the more “aggressive” of the 2-year-old boys to retain their penis, while the other was given a surgically constructed vagina and reassigned as a girl. By the time he was 10, he had reasserted his identity as a boy.Other twins’ separation surgeries were the subject of occasional controversy from the 1980s into the early 2000s. Doctors justified them as giving children a chance at a “normal” life, and usually portrayed them as well-intentioned even if they failed. But many were not clearly medically necessary. Ethicists such as Alice Dreger, the author One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal, argued against a risky medical “cure” performed on children who could not consent to it. Meanwhile, the Schappells were living in their own apartment. George’s spina bifida had impeded his growth, so he was much smaller than his twin; they got around with George perched on a barstool-height wheelchair so he could roll along beside Lori as she walked. Lori got a job at a hospital, and they pursued hobbies (George: country music; Lori: bowling) and made friends (Lori also dated). They kept pets, including a Chihuahua and a fish whom they named George years before George chose that name as his own. They went to bars, where a bartender once refused service to George because he looked underage, but agreed to pour drinks for Lori. They did not live “normal” lives: They lived their lives.[Read: Why is it so hard to find jobs for disabled workers?]But as the public became familiar with the model of separation for conjoined twins, the Schappells found themselves asked, repeatedly, to explain their continued conjoined existence. In 1992, they gave what seem to be their first interviews, to The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News; the news hook was local doctors’ decision not to separate another pair of twins who were joined, like the Schappells, at the head. The Schappells initially explained to reporters that medical science hadn’t been advanced enough for separation when they'd been born. But later they would stress that they wouldn’t have wanted to be separated even if they had been given the choice. “I don’t believe in separation,” Lori told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “I think you are messing with God’s work.”Not long after those first articles were published, the twins began appearing more frequently in the media. They did the rounds of the great 1990s freak shows—Maury, Jerry Springer, Sally, Howard Stern. They became the most visible non-separated conjoined twins of the era. Observers, journalists, and talk-show audiences tended to overwrite the Schappells with their own perceptions. The twins were inspirational, or pitiable; they epitomized cooperation, or individualism. I can’t imagine your lives, people would say, even as they proceeded to do just that. The Virginia Quarterly Review once published a poem written in Lori’s voice, in which the poet took it upon herself to warn an imagined observer: “You don’t know the forest / of two minds bound by weeds / grown from one to the other, / the synapses like bees / cross-pollinating / our honeyed brain.”The twins, though, did not seem overly concerned about whether others understood them, and they did not go out of their way to change the world. They were not activists. George pursued a career as a country singer; they traveled; they grew older. When their Chihuahua lost the use of its hind legs, George made it a tiny wheelchair. The world slowly changed around them. Institutionalization for disabled people is less common today, though it still happens.[From the March 2023 issue: Society tells me to celebrate my disability. What if I don’t want to?]Conjoined twins now occupy far less space in the public imagination. The pair currently most famous are Abby and Brittany Hensel, who have constructed their public image as so aggressively unexceptional that a reality show about their lives was, in at least one viewer’s words, “super boring.” (Their public performance of ordinariness is not always successful; earlier this year, when Today reported that Abby had gotten married, the reaction was predictable, mingling pity and prurience.)Separation surgeries are still performed today, but they are no longer the subject of intense public debate. Instead, one of the most visible medical controversies of our era, gender transition for young people, is related to another aspect of George’s identity. Although children who identify as trans aren’t eligible for medical interventions before the onset of puberty and only some choose hormones or surgery in their late teens, the idea of little kids receiving those treatments has helped inflame panic over whether they should be allowed at all, even for adults.In the case of 2-year-old Win Htut, surgical transition was seen as restoring “normality.” But today, medical transition is often seen as creating difference. When you consider that history, a devotion to “normality” seems to be the primary motivator behind a recent raft of state laws outlawing transition care for transgender youth. After all, most of these laws carve out exceptions for children born with ambiguous genitalia. “Corrective” genital operations are still a routine practice for intersex infants, despite the protests of intersex adults, who say they would not have chosen to be surgically altered.[Read: Young trans children know who they are]George didn’t say much publicly about being trans, and never mentioned running up against any anti-trans bigotry. But when the twins’ obituaries ran on the website of a local funeral home last month, they were described as their parents’ “daughters,” and George was listed under his birth name. Whatever the intent in doing so, the obituary posthumously obscured his identity by correcting his “abnormality”—despite the fact that, in life, the twins had never apologized for being different.

Reagan-era classroom battles previewed today’s war on “woke.”

The guardian of the special relationship—the historical but possibly mythical bond between the United States and the United Kingdom—is a short woman with discerning blue eyes and a penchant for glittering headbands.The role of an ambassador has always been strange. They’re expected to be fun—to flit around comfortably at galas and cocktail parties, charming guests and making inroads with important people while waiters weave around with platters of deviled eggs. Still, British Ambassador Karen Pierce’s real duty is to lobby for her country and offer advice on delicate matters during heated international moments. And the job of an ambassador—even one representing a close ally—has become far more complex because of the strident partisanship that has taken hold in D.C.Part of Pierce’s mission recently has been to represent the British government’s firmly pro-Ukraine position on providing military aid—even when the Biden administration’s matching desire became mired in Congress because of protests by a Trump-aligned faction of House Republicans.[Elaine Godfrey: Trump’s VP search is different this time]Pierce had not only lobbied hard on Capitol Hill ahead of last week’s long-awaited congressional vote on aid; she’d also traveled with Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, to Mar-a-Lago to try to get buy-in from Donald Trump. (She has been tight-lipped about their meeting, and was certainly claiming no credit, but the former president’s toned-down opposition to the bill probably did help the package pass—even though more Republican lawmakers voted against it than for it.)In an era when populist politics and rising nationalism are challenging the institutions of the international liberal order, diplomacy can seem like a quaint relic of bygone etiquette.The more public side of an ambassador’s job seems much easier. Over the past three years, Pierce has become well known for throwing lively and well-attended Pimms-fueled bashes, especially in the D.C. social season surrounding the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Underneath the surface frippery, though, Pierce is a serious operator. The true art of her diplomacy is the very English thing of working hard to make it all look totally effortless.One evening last week, I watched Pierce at work. During a party two days before the WHCD, she buzzed around the lush green garden of her Washington residence, chatting with various politicos.The 64-year-old Pierce grew up in northwest England and has worked for the U.K.’s Foreign Office for 43 years. She’s held positions in Japan, in Ukraine, and in the Balkans during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia. For a year, she lived in Kabul as Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan, and she represented the U.K. at the United Nations for three years. Although she was made a dame in 2018, Pierce’s working-class background makes her a relative outsider in the foreign service, which is otherwise a bastion of the upper-class elite. Being Britain’s first female ambassador to the U.S. does too. She leans into it.The day I saw her, she was wearing a vivid chartreuse dress and black tights, with her feet tucked daintily into a pair of black-and-white kitten heels. Despite being shorter than everyone else at the party, she still commanded the attention of all the people in her vicinity. Pierce has worn tangerine suits to state events, and baby-pink silk dresses with huge round sunglasses. Once, to attend a UN summit, she wrapped herself in what looked like a maroon feather boa. Such displays aren’t just a sartorial choice; they’re a strategy.“When you’re an ambassador, you want people to remember you,” she told me. So I made note of her leaf-patterned sheath dress, shiny blue blazer, and cheetah-print headband. About that feather boa; it wasn’t one. “It was a fur, but it was fake,” Pierce insisted. “Though the Russians tried to say it was an exotic fur.” She rolled her eyes. “The Russians will go for anything. They really have no scruples whatsoever.”[Read: What a former U.S. ambassador to Russia learned from Condoleezza Rice]The wall behind the desk in Pierce’s office, a cheerful, sunlit room in an otherwise sterile building, is covered in magnets collected from around the world (“The tackier the better,” she told The Washington Post). Orchids decorate the tables.Entertaining is part of the job. But don’t call them parties: “We would call them receptions, because we treat them as work events,” she chided me. In the days surrounding the WHCD on April 27, Pierce hosted an embassy reception that provided not only a selection of assorted British pasties, but a cigar room and Scotch bar as well. She also made appearances at half a dozen events put on by various Washington bigwigs and media outlets, and emceed a Sunday brunch in the embassy garden. Pierce’s drink of choice? “I like lots and lots of cocktails, but the more pink they are, the better, I’m afraid.”Pierce’s first job in D.C. was as private secretary to the then-ambassador. She arrived in 1992 with her husband, former U.K. Treasury Secretary Charles Roxburgh, and her first of two children, an infant at the time. “The fact that politics is in the air is just—and also the fact that you’re in the capital of the leading nation in the world—I get a real buzz out of that,” she said.In 1995, Pierce watched as Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House, and American politics grew more polarized. When she came back to serve as ambassador in March 2020, she saw that trend intensify, culminating in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. “I watch all of these developments, and we spend a lot of time evaluating them and finding historical context for them,” she told me.But Pierce wasn’t particularly eager to discuss current politics—or the ex- and possibly future president who has sent that polarization into overdrive. Her caution made sense: Pierce’s predecessor, Kim Darroch, resigned from his position after leaks revealed that he’d criticized the Trump administration as “inept and insecure.” When I asked her about the former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, whose time in office famously lasted only about as long as a head of lettuce stayed fresh, and who has recently cozied up to the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Pierce’s expression was steely. “She’s a private individual, and she’s welcome to pursue her politics,” she said. “It’s not where the British government is.”[Read: America’s Trumpiest ambassador]The day after we met in her embassy office, Pierce showed up early at the Hilton Hotel, in a rich-blue gown and a pair of cascading diamond earrings, greeting as many people as possible before the Correspondents’ Dinner officially began. This year’s dinner was probably Pierce’s last spring soirée; a new British ambassador is expected to replace her by the end of 2024.Leaving will be hard, Pierce said during a Politico podcast taping—“I’ll have to be dragged out of [here] by my fingernails”—not least because this is an election year. A return to the Oval Office for the resident of Mar-a-Lago could mean a challenging new dynamic between the U.S. and the U.K. Pierce joked about being reluctant to leave America, but her concern about a possible end of aid to Ukraine seemed obvious.That aside, her domestic assessment was surprisingly rosy—or at least highly diplomatic. “I personally do not worry about America,” she told me. “I have a lot of faith in American democracy and in Americans, and I think you have very strong institutions.” Pierce’s faith in what an ambassador to America can achieve seemed unshaken, even amid the capital’s current dysfunction. She didn’t hesitate to assert that confidence when I asked her advice for her soon-to-be-announced successor: “Make the weather.”

Here in Ukraine, we often react very emotionally when we hear people in the West calling for peace with Russia. According to some commentators, this would be achieved by means of a “compromise,” entailing Ukrainian “concessions” that would somehow satisfy the Kremlin and stop the war: major territorial giveaways, armed forces reduced to insignificance, no further integration with the West—you name it.Most of us see such views as extremely naive, given the totalitarian and militaristic nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Having built his rule on war hysteria, land grabs, imperial chauvinism, and global confrontation, Putin is hardly likely to stop even at a deal that most Ukrainians would find entirely unacceptable.But that leads us to another problem that much of the Western media fail to fully appreciate: Ten years of confrontation with the Kremlin, and especially the past two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, have fundamentally changed Ukraine. These changes are not superficial or easily swept away.[Read: The one element keeping Ukraine from total defeat]A little more than a decade ago, many young Ukrainians—including those, like myself, from Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east—were angry and restless, itching for something we saw just over the horizon. In high schools and universities, we read Montesquieu and soaked up such tantalizing concepts as the rule of law, democracy, and human rights. Western values felt native to our generation; we were open to the world in a way that our parents had never imagined. Most of them had ventured no farther than Central Asia for their Soviet military service, or maybe Moscow for the 1980 Olympics. This essay is adapted from I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv. My peers and I wanted our country to have clean streets, polite police, and government officials who would resign at the exposure of petty corruption scandals. We wanted to be able to start businesses without passing money under the table, and to trust that courts of law would render justice. What we did not want were irremovable, lifetime dictators who packed the government with cronies on the take and sent goons to beat us up in the streets.In Kyiv’s Maidan Square, starting in November 2013 and lasting into February 2014, demonstrators showed their fervor for such a future in what became known as the Revolution of Dignity. Some gave their lives to unseat Viktor Yanukovych, the kleptocratic ruler Moscow supported, and orient Ukraine unequivocally toward the West. At the site of desolation, armloads of flowers commemorated these dead. Yanukovych fled a country that despised him and had spiraled out of his control.A new Ukraine began—and with it, a decade-long war of independence, as the Kremlin marked our revolution by seizing Crimea and infiltrating the Donbas region in the country’s east. For nearly a decade, Ukraine was fighting on two fronts: a military war against Russia, and an internal struggle for its revolution’s ideals, which meant stamping out corruption, obsolescence, unfreedom—everything that might drag the country back into the past.Ukraine is still far from achieving all that my generation once dreamed of. But we do live in a country that is radically different from the Russian-influenced Ukraine of 2013—politically, mentally, and culturally. And we are starkly different from Putin’s Russia.Ukrainians have tasted freedom and experienced a competitive, vibrant political life. We elected a comedian to be our leader after he faced down an old-school political heavyweight in a debate that was held in a giant stadium in downtown Kyiv and aired live to the nation. We’ve reinvented Ukrainian culture, generating new music, poetry, and stand-up comedy. Starting in 2014, we had to build our country’s armed forces almost from scratch; we are insanely proud of them, as they have fought heroically against one of the largest and most brutal war machines in existence.A few weeks ago, I brought my dog to a veterinarian in Bucha, the town outside Kyiv where Russian forces committed a well-documented massacre in 2022. As the young doctor handled my dog, I noticed a large Ukrainian trident entwined with blue and yellow ribbons tattooed on her wrist under her white sleeve. For my generation of Ukrainians, such national symbols are an expression of pride in all we’ve made and defended.I was with one of the first groups of journalists to enter Bucha after the Russian retreat in 2022. To describe the atmosphere is very difficult: I remember rot, stillness, a miasma of grief. The Russians had graffitied the letter V everywhere. On a fence along the main street: Those entering the no-go zone shall be executed. V. We followed the Ukrainian police as they broke through doors into premises inhabited only by the dead. Some of the bodies were charred and mutilated. I saw two males and two females lying on the ground, incompletely burned, their mouths open and hands twisted. One looked to be a teenage girl.Outside the Church of Andrew the Apostle—a white temple that rises high over Bucha—Ukrainian coroners in white hazmat suits carefully removed layers of wet, clayish soil from a mass grave and placed 67 bodies on simple wooden doors under the cold drizzle. A tow truck hoisted the cadavers out one by one, hour by hour. Now and again, the rain would pick up, and the coroners would hastily cover the grave with plastic sheeting stained with dried gore.“My theory is that there was a very brutal Russian commander in charge of Bucha,” Andriy Nebytov, the chief of police for Kyiv Oblast, told reporters at the church that day. “And they unleashed hell in this place.”The Continent apartment complex used to be one of the finest in Bucha. I met a guy named Mykola Mosyarevych in a basketball court there. In his 30s and fit, he was a likely target for the Russians—a potential guerrilla fighter or member of the Territorial Defense—and so he’d spent the whole month in a basement. After the Russians left Bucha, on the day of my visit, he sat staring at a pair of ripped Russian fatigues marked with the orange-and-black striped ribbon of Saint George—a symbol of war and love for destruction. He wept. Over and over again, he said: “I just don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why they would want to do all this to us.”We all asked similar questions, and our fragmentary answers could bring little comfort to Mosyarevych or anyone else: lust for power, years of aggressive propaganda, a sense of impunity, a would-be emperor grasping at illusion. Deep down, fear.[Read: Ukraine’s shock will last for generations]Later that day, I walked alone with my camera through what was left of a Russian armored column on Vokzalna Street. Bucha’s defenders recalled that the Russians in this column had been moving carelessly and singing patriotic songs when Ukrainian forces struck their leading and trailing vehicles. The column stopped. The remaining Russian vehicles scrambled like bumper cars to maneuver through the wreckage, find a way out, and save themselves. But Vokzalna Street is narrow: They were trapped. A Ukrainian artillery strike left hardly any vehicle whole. The layer of ash on the ground was so thick that it crunched underfoot like snow.What used to be a leafy green lane, part of my favorite bicycle route to Bucha and Hostomel, had become a cemetery. But within three weeks, Ukrainian workers had cleared away the rubble and repaved the road. Later, Warren Buffett’s son donated funds for Ukrainian authorities to completely renovate the street and construct new, Scandinavian-style, single-family houses with lawns and picket fences. Online, people posted tens of thousands of likes and comments under images comparing Vokzalna Street during the Russian occupation and after.Springtime soon came, too, and with it snaking lines of cars, as thousands of people who had fled poured back into their hometown days after its liberation. Young mothers returned with their strollers. Time would absorb the grief and horrors of this war, as it had of so many that had come before.Even so, I don’t want to think about what will happen to my dog’s veterinarian if the Russians make it back to Bucha. Or what will happen to Ukraine. After everything that’s transpired over the past decade—and especially given what Russia has become—Ukraine must not be made a Russian colony again.Today’s Russia is a neo-Stalinist dictatorship led by an aging chauvinist. In the grip of his messianic delusion, Putin initiated the biggest European war since World War II. He seeks to eliminate Ukraine not only as an independent nation, but also as an idea. No concessions or compromises are possible with such a vision—not given the kind of country Ukrainians have made and fought to defend.This essay is adapted from I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv, published on May 7 by Bloomsbury.

On a day that began like any other, the unwitting star of The Truman Show saw something that changed his entire world. For a few, unnerving seconds, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) came face-to-face with his father—a man he believed to be dead. In the 1998 film, this implausible encounter catalyzed Truman’s realization that the small beach town he called home was really a suburb-size production studio designed to confine him. After decades of being secretly surveilled as part of a never-ending reality show, Truman found freedom when his broadcast finally ended.More than 25 years and countless reality-TV franchises later, The Truman Show remains a prescient meditation on the creeping dangers of a ceaseless entertainment cycle that ruthlessly commodifies real people’s lives. “I’m trying to self–Truman Show myself,” the comedian Jerrod Carmichael says early in a new unscripted series about his life around the time of his Emmy win for Rothaniel, the 2022 stand-up special in which he publicly came out as a gay man. Carmichael’s growing pains, as captured on Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, reflect existential and interpersonal turmoil: fractured familial ties, strained friendships, self-destructive behavior that threatens his first real relationship with a man. But his allusion to the Carrey film is one of many explanations he gives for wanting to expose so much of himself to audiences: Early on, he claims that cameras put him at ease, and that their constant presence may help him overcome his damaging tendency to lie in his real life.In this way, Reality Show actually inverts the original Truman Show premise, which hinged on Truman being unaware of the elaborate artifice required to sustain his televised life. Carmichael, by contrast, co-created and co-executive-produced his new series, a level of involvement that makes it fundamentally impossible for the show to exist as an impartial record of his transgressions, which he seems to want to acknowledge and make amends for. The comic does repeatedly acknowledge this key tension: He often addresses the camerapeople during scenes, drawing attention to the literal production of his narrative. Still, pointing out this artifice doesn’t diminish its creative interference. As my colleague Megan Garber wrote in 2020 about the 20th anniversary of Survivor, viewers “understand that reality, a postmodern genre in a post-truth culture, turns the logic of fictional entertainment on its head: It demands a willing suspension of belief.” For the most part, Carmichael’s series presents itself as a refreshing, experimental corrective to such farce. The comedian likens the camera to God; he knowingly inundates viewers with a litany of his sins. But publicly admitting one’s flaws isn’t inherently virtuous, and more often than not, Carmichael’s eagerness to divulge the unpalatable details of his life ends up turning the act of seeking forgiveness into voyeuristic spectacle.The stakes of the show’s storytelling choices are high for the comic’s loved ones, who don’t necessarily stand to profit directly from his HBO deal. (In fact, one friend who appears on the series, a fellow comedian, told Vulture he had to push just to get paid $1,000.) And despite Carmichael’s stated desire to use the cameras as a truth-telling agent, everyone around him is clearly aware that the comic can still manipulate the final product to privilege its creator. Throughout the series, many of those people articulate that power imbalance: “Dude, this is not a neutral eye,” says one of his friends, who only appears on-screen wearing an anonymizing mask, in the first episode. Shortly afterward, the friend implies that Carmichael’s project risks being “masturbatorily public.” It’s an astute observation: If Rothaniel sublimated the agony of keeping secrets, then Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show revels in the fantasy of finding absolution through public confession.Carmichael’s approach to confession differs from the way it appears on most reality TV shows. Generally, producers lead a cast member into an isolated studio, where they’re encouraged to speak candidly—and, ideally, confrontationally—about their peers, in order to sow the kind of chaos that boosts ratings. Carmichael, though, reserves the bulk of his self-taped, lo-fi confessionals for disparaging himself. It’s profoundly uncomfortable to witness. Early in one episode, during a stand-up bit sandwiched in the middle of a scene where he shops for sex toys, Carmichael offers up this blithe assessment of his sexuality: “In gay years, I’m 17,” which he explains means he wants to have sex with “a lot of people, all the time.” Later, after one of the many times he cheats on his boyfriend, Carmichael takes an entirely different tone as he speaks into a camcorder. “I want God. I feel spiritually unclean. I feel dirty,” he says, sitting on the floor in a literal closet. With his head in his hands, he adds, “Sex offers me power and control. It’s an escape.” Such scenes instead underscore how stuck Carmichael is—yes, he’s not actually in the closet anymore, but he’s nowhere close to having a healthy relationship to sex, or to being reliably honest with his partner.[Read: What reality TV reveals about motherhood]These moments also highlight the tremendous emotional toll that unscripted projects can take on participants who aren’t running the show. Carmichael’s quest to become a better person doesn’t happen in a vacuum; a constellation of real people with real feelings are affected when he acts with selfish, reckless abandon. Nowhere is this more unsettling to watch than in how he treats the men he’s drawn to, especially his boyfriend. Whatever hope for accountability might have been seeded during Carmichael’s post-infidelity self-flagellation is undone by a wrenching scene where Carmichael and his boyfriend, Mike, attend relationship counseling. Carmichael tells their therapist that he’s feeling “pretty good monogamy-wise,” and jokes that he doesn’t have the time to cheat. But when the cameramen suddenly move closer to Carmichael’s face, Mike suspects something is off. “I knew then, like, that they know something that I don’t,” he says later—and, of course, Carmichael actually is still being unfaithful. In the short but devastating segment, it’s hard to hear the palpable hurt in Mike’s voice and not wonder whether the audience is somehow implicated in Carmichael’s decision to prioritize a public performance of confession over being honest with his partner in private.And it’s especially curious that Carmichael identifies the camera as God. Seen through that lens, his navel-gazing starts to look similar to the suffocating shame that fear-based religious dogma can stoke beginning in childhood. Of course, most adults who still struggle with that shame don’t do so in front of an HBO audience. Still, Reality Show is most compelling when the comic seriously wrestles with the residual pains of being raised in a conservative Christian household—dynamics that are familiar to many other Black queer people. In the latest episode, titled “Homecoming,” he brings Mike home to meet his family. Carmichael and his devout mother remain on shaky ground, an uneasy détente that affects everyone around them. The episode doesn’t end with a neat ribbon, but by its conclusion, Carmichael and his mother have had multiple frustrating, important conversations about what they need from each other.These vignettes are striking because other people’s feelings aren’t entirely out of focus, and Carmichael’s voice isn’t the only one we hear. After several family members attempt to mediate, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine Carmichael and his mother building toward some kind of off-screen resolution. “Could my mom change?” he asks in a stand-up bit toward the end of the episode. He pauses for a moment, then answers his own question: “It’s reason to keep fighting.” I hope, for Carmichael’s sake, that he invests more time in that journey than in devising ways to make sure the rest of us watch.

A few months ago, I had an email exchange with a person who works in the right-wing-media world. He said that crime was “surging,” a claim that just happened to advance the Trumpian narrative that America during the Biden presidency is a dystopia.I pointed out that the preliminary data showed a dramatic drop in violent crime last year. (Violent crime spiked in the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, during the coronavirus pandemic, and has declined in each year of Joe Biden’s presidency.) During our back-and-forth, my interlocutor at first denied that crime had dropped. He sent me links showing that crime rates in Washington, D.C., were increasing, as though a national drop in crime couldn’t be accompanied by an increase in individual cities. He insisted the data I cited were false, implying they were the product of the liberal media. “Perception is reality,” he told me. “Nobody is buying the narrative that crime is getting better.”Eventually, after I responded to each of his claims, he reluctantly conceded that crime, rather than surging, was dropping—but ascribed the source of the progress to Republican states. I corrected him on that assertion, too. (Crime has dropped in both red and blue states.) He finally admitted that, yes, crime was decreasing, and in blue states too, but said the drop was inevitable, the result of the pandemic’s end. So he blamed Biden when he thought violent crime was increasing and insisted Biden deserves no credit now that violent crime is decreasing.[Rogé Karma: The great normalization]I consider where we ended up a victory, but only a partial and temporary one. His fundamental storyline hasn’t changed. Virtually every day he insists that life in America under Biden is a hellscape and that his reelection would lead to its destruction.Welcome to MAGA world.I mention this exchange because it reveals something important about the MAGA mind. Trump and his supporters have a deep investment in promoting fear. At almost every Trump rally, the former president tries to frighten his supporters out of their wits. He did this in 2016 and 2020, and he’s doing it again this year.“If he wins,” Trump said of Biden during a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, “our country is going to be destroyed.” Trump also said this of Biden: “He’s a demented tyrant.” After Trump’s victories on Super Tuesday, he told an audience of his supporters, “Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying.”Other politicians have been fearmongers, but none has been as relentless and effective as Trump. He has an unparalleled ability to promote feelings of terror among his base, with the goal of translating that terror into votes.But as I recently argued, Biden has been president for nearly three and a half years, and America has hardly entered a new Dark Age. In some important respects, in fact, the nation, based on empirical evidence, is doing better during the Biden years than it did during the Trump years. And evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, who comprise the most loyal and embittered parts of the Trump base, enjoy perhaps the greatest degree of religious liberty they ever have, and they are among the least persecuted religious communities in history. The number of abortions, of particular concern for evangelical Christians, declined steadily after 1990. At the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, during which there was a decrease of nearly 30 percent, the number of abortions reached its lowest level since Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973. (During the Trump administration, the number of abortions increased by 8 percent.)For many Trump supporters, then, fear is not so much the cause of their support for the former president as a justification for it. They use fear to rationalize their backing for Trump. They have a burning need to promote catastrophism, even if it requires cognitive distortion, spreading falsehoods, and peddling conspiracy theories.But why? What’s driving their ongoing, deepening fealty to Trump?Part of the explanation is partisan loyalty. Every party rallies around its presidential nominee, even if the nation is flourishing under the stewardship of an incumbent from the other party.But that reasoning takes us only so far in this case. For one thing, it’s nearly inconceivable to imagine that if any other former president did what Trump has done, Republicans would maintain their devotion to him. Richard Nixon committed only a fraction of Trump’s misdeeds, and the GOP broke with him over the revelation of the “smoking gun” tapes. It was not his liberal critics, but the collapse of support within the Republican Party, that persuaded Nixon to resign.Beyond that, Trump was not an incumbent this cycle. In 2020, he lost the presidency by 72 electoral votes and 7 million popular votes; Republicans lost control of the Senate, and Democrats maintained their majority in the House. In the past, when a one-term president was defeated and dragged his party down in the process, he was shown the exit. But despite Trump being a loser, Republicans remain enthralled by him. So something unusual is going on here.Human beings have a natural tendency to organize around tribal affiliations. Some are drawn to what the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen calls the “need for chaos,” and wish to “burn down” the entire political order in the hopes of gaining status in the process. (My colleague Derek Thompson wrote about Petersen and his work earlier this year.) And social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt point out that mutual outrage bonds people together. Sharing anger can be very pleasurable, and the internet makes doing this orders of magnitude easier.For several decades now, the Republican base has been unusually susceptible to these predispositions. Grievances had been building, with Republicans feeling as though they were being dishonored and disrespected by elite culture. Those feelings were stoked by figures such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who decivilized politics and turned it into a blood sport. And then came Trump, the most skilled and successful demagogue in American history.An extraordinary connection between Trump and his base was forged when he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 and employed his dehumanizing language. Almost every day since then, he has selected targets at which to channel his hate, which appears to be inexhaustible, and ramped up his rhetoric to the point that it now echoes lines from Mein Kampf. In the process, he has fueled the rage of his supporters.Trump not only validated hate; he made it fashionable. One friend observed to me that Trump makes his supporters feel as if they are embattled warriors making a last stand against the demise of everything they cherish, which is a powerful source of personal meaning and social solidarity. They become heroes in their own mythological narratives.But it doesn’t stop there. Trump has set himself up both as a Christ figure persecuted for the sake of his followers and as their avenging angel. At a speech last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said, “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”“You’re not selling ‘Morning in America’ from Mar-a-Lago,” Steve Bannon, one of the MAGA movement’s architects, told The New York Times’ Charles Homans. “You need a different tempo. He needed to reiterate to his followers, ‘This is [expletive] revenge.’”Malice, enmity, resentments: These are the emotions driving many Trump supporters. They’re why they not only accept but delight in the savagery and brutishness of Trump’s politics. They’re why you hear chants of “Fuck Joe Biden” at Trump rallies. His base constantly searches for new targets, new reasons to be indignant. It activates the pleasure center of their brain. It’s a compulsion loop.Which brings me back to the exchange I described at the beginning of this essay. My interlocutor was clearly rooting against good news; though he would deny it, the implication of his response was that he wanted crime to get worse. Not because he was rooting for innocent people to die, though that would be the effect. What appeared to animate him—as it has for the entire Biden presidency—is the awareness that good news for America means bad news for MAGA world. Worse yet, good news would be celebrated by people—Biden, Democrats, Never Trumpers—he has grown to hate. But hate is an unattractive emotion to celebrate; it benefits from a polite veneer.[Read: You should go to a Trump rally]In this case, the finishing coat is fear, the insistence that if Biden is president, all that Trump’s supporters hold dear will die. This isn’t true, but it doesn’t matter to them that it’s not true. The veneer also makes it easier for Trump supporters—evangelical Christians, “constitutional conservatives,” champions of law and order, and “family values” voters among them—to justify their support for a man who embodies almost everything they once loathed.Even as Donald Trump’s politics has become more savage, his threats aimed at opponents more ominous, and his humiliation of others more frequent—he has become ever more revered by his supporters.I imagine that even some of the Republican Party’s harshest liberal critics could not have anticipated a decade and a half ago that the GOP would be led by a man who referred to a violent mob that stormed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power as “political prisoners,” “hostages,” and “patriots.” It’s been an astonishing moral inversion, a sickening descent. And it’s not done.