Watching a film in a theater, free of smartphones, sunlight, and other distractions, can be a hypnotic experience. When the lights go down and the smell of popcorn fills your nose; when the sound roars from the back and an imagined universe is literally projected before you; when multiple sensory inputs braid themselves together to create a potent whole, you might lose yourself in the best possible way.But film isn’t the only medium by which a story can effortlessly enter your consciousness, shutting out reality for precious hours. A great work of literature can feel equally enthralling, be it through vivid characterization, an auteur-like control of the scene, or a particularly vibrant setting. Books that achieve this transcendent state are not necessarily those that make for enthralling film or television; nor do they tend to focus on Hollywood or the filmmaking process. Instead, they produce a parallel kind of phenomenon; they share the thrill of movies by dissolving the physical limitations of the page. Here are six books that can—like a good movie—make the rest of the world fall away. Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pulphead, by John Jeremiah SullivanThe subjects of Sullivan’s journalism tend to be both profoundly human and slightly surreal, like the type of person you’d hear a story about at a party, or believe existed only on-screen. Yet all the people in Sullivan’s 2011 essay collection, Pulphead, which features his work across magazines and literary journals, are genuine. Some—such as Michael Jackson and Axl Rose—are already familiar to readers; in these cases, Sullivan’s deep dives uncover both the bizarre nature of public-facing celebrity and the real person beneath. The stars of his profiles, though, are lesser-known figures. An essay titled “La • Hwi • Ne • Ski: Career of an Eccentric Naturalist,” focuses on Constantine Rafinesque, a 19th-century French polymath, botanist, philologist, and writer whose time in Kentucky put him in contact with the birder John James Audubon. Rafinesque’s erratic and eccentric behavior, as part heretic and part adventurer, cements him as a figure of forgotten legend. Even more memorable is Marc Livengood, the academic at the center of Sullivan’s “Violence of the Lambs,” whose theory that climate change may force mankind into a war against animals takes truly unfathomable turns that’ll have you questioning everything you know—and what Sullivan tells you. Vintage Interior Chinatown, by Charles YuYu’s second novel, Interior Chinatown, borrows the format of a screenplay, perhaps benefiting from Yu’s previous gig as a story editor on HBO’s Westworld. But the book is neither a full script nor a conventional novel, existing instead as an exciting hybrid-prose experiment. Its protagonist, Willis Wu, is frustrated with his status as a “Generic Asian Man” in the film industry, as Yu writes, and is stuck playing various background roles on a television police procedural. From there, Yu allows the reader to become something of the director of Willis’s life: You’re asked to envision the settings, the props, and the cadence of the dialogue. Interior Chinatown accomplishes two major feats: It tells a lively tale that feels like inside baseball for those curious about how TV and movies come to life, and it also upends how we think of the procedural as a genre. A television adaptation, on which Yu is one of the writers, is set for this fall; this recursion—a TV show inside a book inside a TV show—adds yet another meta element that the episodes may play with.[Read: How my first novel became a movie] Drawn and Quarterly Sabrina, by Nick DrnasoAlmost no one is writing like Drnaso, whose second book, Sabrina, became the first graphic novel to be nominated for the Booker Prize, in 2018. The story, which explores the exploitative nature of both true crime and the 24-hour news cycle, focuses on a woman named Sabrina who goes missing, leaving her loved ones to hope, pray, and worry. When a video of her murder goes viral on social media, those close to her get sucked into supporting roles in strangers’ conspiracy theories. Drnaso’s style across all of his works—but especially in Sabrina—is stark and minimal: His illustrations are deceptively simple, yet entrancing. He doesn’t overload the book with dialogue. He knows and trusts his readers to put the pieces together; part of the audience’s job is to conjure how his characters feel as they approach the mystery of Sabrina’s disappearance and death. Drnaso wants to show the reader how, in a society full of misinformation and wild suppositions, the most trustworthy resource might just be your own two eyes. Vintage Jazz, by Toni MorrisonThe dreamlike, ephemeral language of Jazz mirrors the styles of its title, and and feature some of Morrison's most lyrical sentences. It tells the story of a violent love triangle in Harlem in the 1920s, but Jazz resembles, to some degree, the work of Terrence Malick, a filmmaker who investigates the musical and heavenly quality of being alive on Earth. Like his movies, it feels less like a propulsive plot than an immersive textural experience: think of walking through a field, or along a city street rich and humming with people. The novel follows Joe and Violet Trace, whose marriage is upended when Joe murders a much younger woman named Dorcas with whom he was having an affair. Then, at Dorcas’s funeral, Violet attacks the young woman’s dead body. What could descend into relationship melodrama instead explodes into a riveting and melancholy exploration of race and history.[Read: Seven books that explain how Hollywood actually works] Riverhead No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia LockwoodConsider the author as a director in the tradition of the auteur: Someone who molds the outlook and vision of their story with almost godlike control. In Lockwood’s novel, No One Is Talking About This, she first introduces the reader to what she calls “the portal,” a metaphor for the smartphone that takes her narrator to an ever-glowing internet realm. There, the narrator achieves a modicum of fame for a nonsensical post: “Can a dog be twins?” Lockwood manages to spin up a genuine universe loosely based on a niche subculture known as “weird Twitter,” where the jokes are all abstract phrases and images six steps removed from their original context. The narrator thrives in this environment––until an unexpected family tragedy wrests her away from her fake life and thrusts her into her real one. This sharp turn grants the novel a depth and scope beyond that of a more straightforward book about illness and grief. In mashing these two realities together, Lockwood shows the reader how robust, strange, and beautiful both her narrator’s online and offline worlds can be—worlds that only this particular writer could conjure. Harper Perennial Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard“Of all known forms of life, only about ten percent are still living today,” Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “All other forms—fantastic plants, ordinary plants, living animals with unimaginably various wings, tails, teeth, brains—are utterly and forever gone.” In the early 1970s, Dillard took to the forests of Virginia near the Blue Ridge Mountains for daily walks and excursions. Her wildlife diaries, set across the seasons, make up the memoir, which won a 1975 Pulitzer Prize. Dillard’s prose is colorful and unafraid of the gooey realities of flora and fauna. She tracks the seasons and their incremental shifts in gorgeous detail, and the words feel as though they’re coming to life. There’s a gory, almost horror-like nature to her descriptions of gnats that reproduce asexually, predator cats that eat their young, or a moth that shrinks in the stages of “molting frenzy,” conjuring an alien planet out of a landscape that might be an hour’s drive away. Like some inventive documentaries, Dillard’s nonfiction dispenses with the hallmarks of its genre in order to focus on conveying truth, and her writing gives sticky reality a grandeur all its own.

For American politicians, this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency, while supporters amplify any falsehood that serves their cause. When I launched PolitiFact in 2007, I thought we were going to raise the cost of lying. I didn’t expect to change people’s votes just by calling out candidates, but I was hopeful that our journalism would at least nudge them to be more truthful.I was wrong. More than 15 years of fact-checking has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies. I underestimated the strength of the partisan media on both sides, particularly conservative outlets, which relentlessly smeared our work. (A typical insult: “The fact-checkers are basically just a P.R. arm of the Democrats at this point.”) PolitiFact and other media organizations published thousands of checks, but as time went on, Republican representatives and voters alike ignored our journalism more and more, or dismissed it. Democrats sometimes did too, of course, but they were more often mindful of our work and occasionally issued corrections when they were caught in a falsehood. This essay has been excerpted from Adair’s new book. Lying is ubiquitous, yet politicians are rarely asked why they do it. Maybe journalists think the reason is obvious; many are reluctant to even use the word lie, because it invites confrontation and demands proof. But the answer could help us address the problem. So I spent the past four years asking members of Congress, political operatives, local officials, congressional staffers, White House aides, and campaign consultants this simple question: Why do politicians lie?In a way, these conversations made me hopeful that officials from both parties might curtail their lying if we find ways to change their incentives. The decision to lie can be reduced to something like a point system: If I tell this lie, will I score enough support and attention from my voters, my party leaders, and my corner of the media to outweigh any negative consequences? “There is a base to play to, a narrative to uphold or reinforce,” said Cal Cunningham, a Democrat who lost a Senate race in North Carolina in 2020 after acknowledging that he had been in an extramarital relationship. “There is an advantage that comes from willfully misstating the truth that is judged to be greater than the disadvantage that may come from telling the truth. I think there’s a lot of calculus in it.” Jim Kolbe, a former Republican member of Congress from Arizona who has since left the party, described the advantage more vividly: A lie “arouses and stimulates their base.”[Tyler Austin Harper: Fact-checking is not a political strategy]Politicians have always played to their base, but polarization has encouraged them to do little else. Now that many politicians speak primarily to their supporters, lying has become both less dangerous and more rewarding. “They gain political favor or, ultimately, they gain election,” said Mike McCurry, who served as White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton. As former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey told me, “It’s human nature to want to get a standing ovation.” Lies also provide easy ammunition for attacking opponents—no opposition research required. They “take points off the board for other candidates,” said Damon Circosta, a Democrat who recently served as the chair of North Carolina’s Board of Elections.Anthony Fauci was often caught in the crossfire. Roger Marshall, a Republican senator from Kansas, once suggested that the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases would not give people access to his financial statements when, in fact, they were available to anyone who requested them. Republican politicians repeatedly—and falsely—accused Fauci of lying and even used his face in fundraising appeals. He brought one of the mailings to a congressional hearing: “It said ‘Fire Fauci,’” he told me, “and then, on the bottom, ‘Donate even $10, $20, $50, $100, $200.’ So there wasn’t any ambiguity.”In the old days, “if someone would say something outlandish, they would be shamed,” Fauci said. That deterrent has disappeared. “There is no shame in lying now.”For my study of political lying, I took a particular interest in Mike Pence. We had been friends and neighbors when he was a member of Congress, and I saw him as a typical politician who would occasionally shade the truth. When he won the race for governor in Indiana, I watched his lies grow. By the time he became Donald Trump’s vice president, he was almost unrecognizable to me.Olivia Troye, who worked as a homeland-security adviser in Pence’s office from 2018 to 2020, saw two versions of him. “It was like watching Jekyll and Hyde sometimes,” she told me. As a boss, he was concerned about details and wanted the facts. But he would compromise all of that when he was asked to recite the Trump administration’s talking points.“At the beginning of the COVID pandemic was probably the most honest I saw Mike Pence ever be,” she said. He addressed the nation frankly and more responsibly than Trump. But Troye cited an op-ed that he wrote for The Wall Street Journal as a turning point. Under the headline “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’” he claimed, in June 2020, that “we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy.” Critics rightly accused him of cherry-picking stats and ignoring reality.But appeals to “reality” have lost their potency. Several people I interviewed described how partisan media, especially on the right, has fostered lying by degrading our shared sense of what’s real. Jeff Jackson, a Democratic representative from Charlotte, North Carolina, told me that outlets expect politicians to repeat falsehoods as the price of admission. “If you’re not willing to treat certain lies as fact, then you simply won’t be invited to address the echo chamber.” Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who left the party in 2020, pointed out that gerrymandering, particularly in red states, has made it so “most of the voters in your district are getting their information from Fox, conservative talk radio … and so you just have this whole bubble of protection around your lies in a way that wouldn’t have been true before, 15 years ago.”[Listen: When fact-checks backfire]The hollowing-out of local news outlets has also made lying easier. “There’s no local reporters following these races,” Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, told me. “All of these local bureaus have been just wiped out, and so there’s nobody following this shit on a day-to-day basis and keeping people accountable.”Experimental studies have found that fact-checking really can convince people. Often, however, the academic findings don’t reflect the real world. Voters rarely seek out fact-checking aimed at their party, and conservatives in particular hear constant criticism of the enterprise, which makes them doubt its validity. (According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Republicans believe that fact-checkers favor one side, while only 29 percent of Democrats do.)If politicians lie because they believe they’ll score more points than they’ll lose, we have to change the calculus. Tech and media companies need to create incentives for truth-telling and deterrents for lying. Platforms of all kinds could charge higher ad rates to candidates who have the worst records among fact-checkers. Television networks could take away candidates’ talking time during debates if they’re caught lying.But these reforms will demand more than just benign corporate intervention. They’ll need broad, sustained public support. Voters may not be willing to place truthfulness over partisan preference in every case. But more will have to start caring about lies, even when their candidate is the culprit.This essay has been excerpted from Bill Adair’s new book, Beyond the Big Lie.

In 1923, as elite American universities began adopting quotas restricting the number of Jews they admitted, an organization was formed to provide a home for Jewish students on campus where they could congregate to pray, socialize, and feel welcome. This organization was called Hillel, and it has been the central address for Jewish life at colleges and universities ever since. That’s how I found my way to it when I was a student at UCLA; overwhelmed by the size of the university, I was looking to connect with a smaller group of individuals with whom I likely shared values, history, and a sense of cultural belonging.I found this at Hillel, where I discovered so much about who I am in this world, and formed relationships that have lasted my entire adult life. That is why I have been heartbroken and horrified in recent months as the broader Hillel organization has become the target of regular threats and attacks.Hillel is where I was taught how to pray, how to learn, and how to participate in charity and social-justice work. Hillel is where I learned to define my Judaism not by my immigrant grandparents’ experience and the Holocaust, but by the joy and beauty of Jewish culture as it is unfolding to this day.Hillel has been foundational to so many Jewish stories over the past century. In the 1930s, it established a student refugee program, saving the lives of nearly 150 young European Jews. In 1947, it helped Hungarian-born Tom Lantos come to the U.S., where he became the only Holocaust survivor to ever be elected to Congress. In the 1950s and ’60s, Hillels across the country organized robust support for the civil-rights movement. In 1960, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Hillel director Max Ticktin addressed 500 students in a march on Library Mall and called for an end to both local and national discrimination, and encouraged students to fight against racist Jim Crow laws. I have raised my children at Hillel, continuing to participate in many capacities even after I received my doctorate; many Hillels are also community centers of a sort, providing religious and spiritual services, meals, and a sense of belonging for those who find themselves at a transition point in their life. When I travel the country and the world, I often visit a local Hillel, and find myself feeling perfectly at home.[Read: The wrong way to fight campus anti-Semitism on campus]And this organization is being attacked all over the country, a dynamic that emerged after October 7 and that appears to have grown only more frequent and intense in recent months, as students have returned to campus. At the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, a message on social media posted by the UW-Milwaukee Popular University for Palestine stated that “ANY organization or entity that supports Israel is not welcome at UWM,” specifically mentioning Hillel. The post went on to say that these organizations “will be treated accordingly as extremist criminals. Stay tuned,” and that Zionist groups will not be normalized or welcomed on campus. At Hunter College, in Manhattan, students at Hillel found a sign depicting an assault rifle, calling on students to Bring the war home next to a sign reading Hillel go to hell with an upside-down triangle, indicating that this Hillel is a target. At a recent Baruch College Hillel event held at a Midtown restaurant in New York City designed for incoming freshmen to learn about campus life, Jewish students were met with protesters shouting references to the hostages recently executed by Hamas; a video posted on Instagram featured a protester shouting to a female student, “Where’s Hersh, you ugly-ass bitch?” (The reference was to Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American citizen recently murdered by Hamas.)In my time as an undergraduate and graduate student at UCLA, I thrived as a student leader at Hillel under the guidance of a boldly liberal Zionist rabbi. He said then what I still believe now: The Palestinian people have a right to self-determination and dignity, and deserve better from their own leadership as well as from Israel. As students, we sought to have peaceful, respectful conversations with students on campus who advocated for the establishment of a Palestinian state. We were met with accusations of racism, swastikas chalked on the bricks of Bruin Walk, and protesters who donned Hamas armbands and stared at us in stony silence. We watched in bewilderment as the “Zionism is racism” campaigns began to take hold on campuses across the country. It was astounding that students would not engage with even those of us who were trying to find common ground and believed in coexistence.In the 1990s, many of us felt that we had little choice but to accept that a few student organizations were comfortable branding Zionism as a form of racism, or wearing regalia of terrorist organizations whose charters included the explicit elimination of the Jewish state. The refusal of some students to engage in dialogue was once an unspoken policy; now it is an explicit one. Anti-normalization is the name for this trend. It is rooted in the idea that merely talking with people who hold a different point of view from you is tantamount to recognition or acceptance of that view and should be avoided at all costs. The refusal to engage shuts down any dialogue and any sincere attempt to bridge our pain and find ways to communicate with empathy and compassion. This tactic reveals an intellectual weakness, an inability to respond reasonably to a point of view that is not your own. And it is fundamentally contrary to the basic values of the university and academia at large: exposure to and a free exchange of ideas, as well as the ability to find creative and positive outlets for differences of opinion.[Read: How resilient are Jewish American traditions?]It is, to put it plainly, undemocratic to support the tactics of drowning out and protesting Israeli or Jewish speakers simply because they are Jewish. It needs to be called out for what it is: anti-Semitism. It is anti-Semitic to seek to deny Jewish students the ability to access the most important organization for Jewish life on campus. We cannot allow this to be normalized.As for me, I have been uninvited from venues since October 7 simply because I am Jewish. I have been shouted down, asked to leave, accused of a hatred I know not how to summon. And my response is one that I and generations of students have learned at Hillel. Hillel teaches that we should not be afraid to be Jewish. We can be proud to be American. And we deserve the rights and privileges awarded to every minority on campus: a safe place to gather, to pray, to learn, and to fight for what is right.

America’s immigration debate has taken a restrictionist turn. Eight years ago, Donald Trump declared that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” and promised to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the southern border. That rhetoric, extreme at the time, seems mild now. Today, he depicts immigrants as psychopathic murderers responsible for “poisoning the blood of our country” and claims that he will carry out the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”Democrats have shifted too. In 2020, Joe Biden ran on the promise to reverse Trump’s border policies and expand legal immigration. “If I’m elected president, we’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” he said during his speech accepting the Democratic nomination. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.” That kind of humanitarian language is gone from Democrats’ 2024 messaging. So is any defense of immigration on the merits. When asked about immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris touts her background prosecuting transnational criminal organizations and promises to pass legislation that would “fortify” the southern border.[Rogé Karma: The truth about immigration and the American worker]The change in rhetoric did not come out of nowhere. Politicians are responding to one of the most dramatic swings in the history of U.S. public opinion. In 2020, 28 percent of Americans told Gallup that immigration should decrease. Just four years later, that number had risen to 55 percent—the highest level since 2001. (Other surveys find similar results.) Republican attitudes have shifted the most, but Democrats and independents have also soured on immigration.Although public opinion is known to ebb and flow, a reversal this big, and this fast, is nearly unheard-of. It is the result of a confluence of two powerful factors: a partisan backlash to a Democratic president and a bipartisan reaction to the genuine chaos generated by a historic surge at the border.Political scientists have long observed that public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of a sitting president’s rhetoric, priorities, and policies, especially when that president is an especially polarizing figure—a phenomenon known as “thermostatic public opinion.” No president has kicked the thermostat into action quite like Trump. In response to his incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric and harsh policies, including the Muslim ban and family separation, being pro-immigrant became central to Democratic identity. In 2016, only 30 percent of Democrats told Gallup they wanted to increase immigration; by 2020, that number had grown to 50 percent. In just four years under Trump, Democratic attitudes toward immigration levels warmed more than they had in the previous 15.But the thermostat works the other way too. When Biden took office, he immediately rescinded many of Trump’s border policies and proposed legislation to “restore humanity and American values to our immigration system.” This triggered a backlash. Right-wing media and Republican politicians sought to turn Biden’s policies into a liability. By mid-2022, the percentage of Republican voters who said immigration should decrease had risen by 21 points. And with Trump no longer in the White House to mobilize the opposition, Democratic immigration attitudes began by some measures to creep closer to their pre-2016 levels as well. “The paradox of Trump was that he inspired an unprecedented positive shift in immigration attitudes,” Alexander Kustov, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told me. “But because it was a reaction to Trump himself, that positivity was always extremely fragile.”Trump is not the entire story, however. Public opinion continued to drift rightward long after Biden took office. From June 2023 to June 2024 alone, the percentage of Democrats who favored decreased immigration jumped by 10 points, and the percentage of Republicans by 15 points. That’s the single largest year-over-year shift in overall immigration attitudes since Gallup began asking the question back in 1965.[Derek Thompson: Americans are thinking about immigration all wrong]Voters may have been responding to the sharp rise in so-called border encounters—a euphemism for the apprehension of undocumented immigrants entering the country from Mexico. These reached a record 300,000 in December 2023, up from 160,000 in January of that year and from just 74,000 in December 2020. The surge overwhelmed Customs and Border Patrol, and scenes of overcrowded immigrant-processing centers and sprawling tent encampments became fixtures on conservative media outlets. Texas Governor Greg Abbott began sending busloads of asylum seekers (about 120,000 at this point) to cities such as New York, Chicago, and Denver, which were caught off guard by the influx. Suddenly blue-state cities across the country got a taste of border chaos in the form of stressed social services, migrants sleeping on streets, frantic city officials, and community backlash. “I don’t think the shift in attitudes is surprising, given what’s been happening at the border,” Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup, told me. “People are sensitive to what’s going on, and they respond to it.”Some experts call this the “locus of control theory,” or, more colloquially, the “chaos theory” of immigration sentiment. The basic idea, grounded in both survey data and political-science research, is that when the immigration process is perceived as fair and orderly, voters are more likely to tolerate it. When it is perceived as out of control and unfair—perhaps due to an uncommonly large surge of migrants—then the public quickly turns against it. Perhaps the best evidence for this theory is that even as Americans have embraced much tighter immigration restrictions, their answers to survey questions such as “Do you believe undocumented immigrants make a contribution to society?” and “Do you support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants?” and even “Should it be easier to immigrate to the U.S?” haven’t changed nearly as much, and remain more pro-immigrant than they were as recently as 2016. “I don’t think these views are contradictory,” Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, a deputy director at the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “People can simultaneously have compassion for immigrants while also feeling anxious and upset about the process for coming into the country.”One implication of chaos theory is that leaders can mitigate opposition to immigration by introducing reforms that make the process less chaotic. That’s what the Biden administration tried to do in June of this year, when it issued a series of executive orders that would, among other things, bar migrants who cross illegally from claiming asylum and give the Department of Homeland Security the ability to halt the processing of asylum claims altogether if the volume of requests gets too high. Border encounters have fallen steadily throughout 2024, reaching about 100,000 in July and August—still a high number, but the lowest level since February 2021. Perhaps not coincidentally, the salience of immigration for voters has also been falling. This past February, 28 percent of Americans told Gallup that immigration was the most important problem facing the country; by August, that number had dropped to 19 percent. (It crept back up to 22 percent in September, for reasons that likely have more to do with the wave of disinformation about Haitian migrants than with crossings at the border, which continued to fall.)The very fact that Biden had to rely on unilateral executive orders, which are being challenged in court, illustrates a deeper issue. Even though most Americans want a more orderly and fair immigration system, the nature of thermostatic public opinion gives the opposition party strong incentives to thwart any action that might deliver it. Earlier this year, congressional Republicans killed a border-security bill—which had previously had bipartisan support—after Trump came out against it, lest the Biden administration be given credit for solving the issue that Trump has staked his campaign on. And if Trump is reelected, the pendulum of public opinion could very well swing back the other way, putting pressure on Democrats to oppose his entire immigration agenda.What’s clear is that the current hawkish national mood is not the fixed end point of American popular sentiment. Attitudes toward immigration will continue to fluctuate in the years to come. Whether public policy changes meaningfully in response is anyone’s guess.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeart Media | YouTube | Pocket CastsAbout 1,500 people have been charged for their actions on January 6. Some brought weapons to the Capitol. Some committed acts of violence that were caught on camera. Some belonged to militias. And then there is a different category of defendant: someone with no criminal record who showed up on that day and went overboard and committed a crime.The families of January 6 defendants have long argued that the punishments their loved ones received were too severe. (The Supreme Court took up one of their arguments and agreed.) In this episode, we contemplate that enduring complaint in an uncomfortably personal way. Soon after we discovered that our new neighbor was Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, Lauren served as a juror on a January 6 case and emerged queasy about the outcome. We visit the defendant’s wife and talk to the judge in the case.This is the fourth episode of We Live Here Now, a six-part series about what happened when we found out that our new neighbors were supporting January 6 insurrectionists.The following is a transcript of the episode:Hanna Rosin: What do you mean you feel bad for him?Lauren Ober: Oh, I feel so bad. I feel so bad because he believed so many lies to get him to this point. Like, he was suckered in. So he’s going to go to jail for believing Donald Trump and for believing all of the rhetoric. And all of those people who spewed that—all the official people who spewed that—there’s nobody official who’s losing.Rosin: Now that hundreds of people have been through the courts for crimes related to January 6, we know a lot more details about who they were. Some were Oath Keepers who showed up prepared for battle. Some carried guns or knives and beat up cops with flagpoles.But there was also another group of just guys—young, curious normies. Or dads who maybe got a little too deep in the MAGA universe and then got a little too wild in the moment—criminal for the day.We know about them, too, because a lot of them had their own YouTube channels or podcasts or whatever. Like this guy, who made this podcast recording with his friend on January 8, right after he flew home. He’s the guy Lauren feels bad for, the guy at the center of this episode. His name is Taylor Johnatakis.Taylor Johnatakis: So this is the girl who was murdered. This is Ashli.Ashli Babbitt: —walking to the Capitol in a mob. There’s an estimated 3 million people—Johnatakis: We’re walking. I was here in this—I was here in this crowd.Babbitt: Despite what the media tells you, boots on ground definitely say something different. There is a sea of nothing but red, white, and blue.Rosin: The podcast host then shows his friend the video that Ashli Babbitt recorded on her phone and posted on Facebook of her walking towards the Capitol with a Trump flag wrapped around her waist.Johnatakis: That was Ashli. That’s Ashli who got killed.Guest: Wow. I had no—I had never seen the face to the name.Johnatakis: Okay. That’s—what?!Guest: I’m serious.Johnatakis: You don’t know her?Guest: No. I’m serious. There’s so much that you just can’t see from the outside.Johnatakis: Oh my gosh.Guest: It may have been played on the news, but I have not seen it. There’s a lot of stuff I haven’t seen.Johnatakis: (Gasps.) I can’t believe it.Guest: Do we need to take a break?Johnatakis: I can’t believe you don’t know her name. Dude. She died for us, man. (Voice breaks.)Guest: Yeah. I don’t—that’s the first time I’ve seen her.Johnatakis: I didn’t realize you didn’t know her name. (Cries.) I’m sorry.Rosin: The podcast host, the guy who is losing it, is not a right-wing media star or an influencer. He’d be lucky if a hundred people listened to his podcast. But someone important did listen: the FBI.So now we are going to take a detour into the more surreal parts of the January 6 aftermath, where a goofy dad of five who had never been accused of a crime in his life gets caught up in an FBI roundup. And we’re doing that because D.C. citizen Lauren Ober was one of the people who had to decide his fate.[Music]Ober: I’m D.C. citizen Lauren Ober.Rosin: And I’m Hanna Rosin. And from The Atlantic, this is We Live Here Now.​Ober: A couple months before I met Micki, I got a notice in the mail. It was a summons for jury duty for the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, Criminal Division. And because I am number-one best citizen, I didn’t throw the summons in the garbage. I opened it.Rosin: On the day she was supposed to show up, which happened to be right after we learned who our neighbors were, Lauren said something offhand to me.Ober: “I bet it’s a January 6 case.”Rosin: We both laughed at this idea. Like, how wild would it be—just weeks after learning that some of your neighbors were very prominent Justice for J6ers—to get onto a January 6 jury? It would just be too weird.Ober: Now, of course you know where this is going. I walked into Courtroom 15 and sat down with other potential jurors, and then the judge told us the trial we were being considered for was a January 6 case, which maybe shouldn’t have been surprising.[Music]Ober: January 6 is the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history. And most of these cases have been adjudicated in D.C. So I guess I had a pretty high chance of ending up on a January 6 jury. Fun fact: You can see a lovely tableau of the U.S. Capitol from the building. I mean, how many courthouses have a view of the crime scene?The defendant, Taylor Johnatakis, was charged with three felonies: obstruction of an official proceeding; civil disorder’ and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers—also, a handful of misdemeanors. In my jury notebook, I wrote: “Looks like a regular guy. Short brown hair, a brown beard, and rectangular glasses.” One thing that stood out was how much Johnatakis smiled and made eye contact with the jury. It seemed like he was—I don’t know—happy to be there or something. It was creepy.Johnatakis: Trump speech is over. It was awesome.Ober: The prosecutor told us in her opening statement that we’d be seeing a lot of video evidence from January 6 because a lot of these guys made videos and recordings of themselves, like the video podcast that you heard earlier, where the host cries about Ashli. That was Johnatakis. He made and posted a lot of videos the prosecution played us at trial, like this:Johnatakis: We’re walking over to the Capitol right now, and—I don’t know—maybe we’ll break down the doors.Ober: And this—Johnatakis: I was on the front line. I was on the gate. I organized a push up to the Capitol because I felt like that is exactly what we needed.Ober: And also this—Johnatakis: We had a right to be there. We were supposed to be there. I was there, okay?Ober: As the case continued, over about three days, there was more and more video evidence. Even in the horde of people swarming the Capitol, Johnatakis was easy to pick out. He was wearing a red MAGA hat and had a megaphone strapped to his back, so the jury could follow his movements as he made his way closer and closer to the doors of the Capitol.As Johnatakis climbed the many sets of stairs that led to the various entrances of the Capitol, he shouted into his megaphone to no one in particular for, like, a solid 10 minutes about oligarchs and censorship and how Mike Pence apparently abused children.Johnatakis: I never, never, never considered the fact that our vice president is a child molester!I never considered the fact that our vice president is in business with the Chinese Communist Party.Ober: When Johnatakis reached the top of the stairs, he was blocked from going any further by a bunch of metal barricades and lines of cops. This is the moment where the prosecution offered evidence that the defendant was not just one of the guys milling around but actually a riot leader, because he was yelling into his megaphone, directing people what to do.Johnatakis: Don’t throw any shit up here. Don’t throw any shit up here. They don’t need that. They don’t need that. And I don’t need to push it back when we come to that. Push it out of here. We’re just using our bodies—Ober: Although no one seemed to be listening to a word he was saying, until he said this.Johnatakis: One, two, three—go! One foot![Cheers and clanging]Ober: This is where the action started. Johnatakis motions to the people around him to put their hands on the barricade. When they do, he shouts, One, two, three, and starts pushing the barricade into the cops. The cops on the barricade push back, while another line of cops behind them shoots pepper spray at the rioters and tries to hit them with nightsticks. The defendant retreats, and the cops restore their line. The whole thing lasts about a minute.When the jury catches up with Johnatakis again, it’s in a video he made as he’s walking away from the Capitol.Johnatakis: They’re that afraid of us. They’re that afraid of us. They had to usher the congressmen and senators out of the House in shame with black bags. I got gassed. I got hit pretty dang hard a couple times with a nightstick. It’s not funny. It hurt. We’re done. I’m walking away from the Capitol. I’ve shed some tears. I’m very sad about what I have watched firsthand unfold.Ober: Now, the prosecution was selling a pretty good story here. In tape after tape, Johnatakis declares, It’s me. I’m here. I’m ready to go. He sounds pretty unhinged, and he uses his megaphone to get a bunch of people to go after the cops.Then it was the defense’s turn, which in this case meant the defendant himself. Despite the judge’s warning against it, Johnatakis decided to represent himself, and the result was bizarre.After the witnesses testified, Johnatakis apologized to them and asked them questions like, Is there anything I can do to make amends for my actions on that day? At some point, he told the jury, I’m sorry for my sins, and I repent. He did argue that a lot of what he’d said was, quote, “hyperbolic rhetoric”—that he had a podcast, and he sometimes used overblown language. That was, at least, a relevant argument. But the videos had shown Johnatakis doing more than just talking.Then both sides made their closing statements. One sounded like a professional court argument, and the other lectured the judge about a legal term and then recited scripture. Then the judge sent us, the members of the jury, off to deliberate.While we deliberated, this is the thing I kept coming back to: Compared to other J6ers I’d read about, this guy wasn’t a member of a militia. He didn’t carry a weapon or beat up a cop.On the other hand, it was pretty clear that Johnatakis had done what he was accused of. We weren’t judging his actions in comparison to others; we were judging based on what we saw on video and witness testimony.Everyone on the jury took it seriously, and the verdict was unanimous: guilty. The clerk read the verdict out loud, and I kept my head down so I wouldn’t accidentally make eye contact with the defendant.A couple of days after the trial, Hanna and I left for a Thanksgiving vacation. I should have been having fun, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Taylor Johnatakis. While we were enjoying our trip, he was sitting in a cell at the D.C. jail, where he would spend the next five months before learning his fate.It didn’t feel like some miscarriage of justice, but I didn’t feel great about it. Almost a year later, I still don’t.Rosin: We explore why that is, after the break.[Break]Rosin: In the days after Lauren’s jury duty, I noticed she had an uncharacteristic heaviness about her, so we sat down and talked about it.Rosin: So did anybody else feel sorry for him?Ober: I mean, I would say that, like, half the people in the room felt bad for him.Rosin: Why? The feeling bad is—I mean, I almost get it. I don’t a hundred percent get it, because it sounds like, you know, the thing you described him doing at the top of the steps with those barriers is edging on a kind of violence. There are victims, who are those cops—Ober: It’s not edging on a kind of violence. It actually is an act of physical violence, technically, according to the law. That is what we were asked to determine, and the government proved that.Rosin: And there were people there—police officers, you know, they’re people. Some of them were traumatized. So the violence didn’t just happen against property. You guys fulfilled your duty. He is guilty. And yet something feels not right to you about the outcome.Ober: Because he seems like a guy who was lost. His whole argument was hyperbolic rhetoric. And he was suggesting that he got caught up in the spirit of, like—for the Trump people, they felt like they were part of something: They’re a part of a thing that is so much bigger than themselves. They are a part of a movement. They’re a part of history. They matter, right? They matter. And—Rosin: But all crimes and genocides are caused by people who have a hole in their life, and then they want to be part of a thing, and so they get swept up in a thing and then—Ober: No. That’s not true. That’s not true at all, because most crimes—most violent crimes—are crimes of passion or crimes of opportunity.Rosin: All mass crimes—all mass, cultural crimes are generally someone in power preying on people who want to matter and belong.Ober: Yes, and I feel bad about that. That is sad to me. That is sad that all of these people who—they did that to themselves. I understand that. I was on a jury, and I found him guilty. I didn’t say he didn’t do this.But this guy is just getting used. He has a nice family, beautiful children. He has a nice wife. He goes to, you know, his church. Like, he has a nice, respectable job. He made his own business. Like, that’s a fine life. That’s a fine life, but in some way, he was led to believe that’s not good enough. You have to fight for this thing. You have to save America because America’s going down the tubes, even though he had probably a really nice life. I don’t know what his life was like, but from all that I can tell, it was, like, nice people.Rosin: Okay, a last thing: Is there anything else that you feel you really want to know? Anything you still have a kind of burning flame of curiosity about?Ober: Yeah. I mean, I would love to understand: What is your family gonna do now? And, you know, Now you’re forever, like, a January 6er. And you’re branded with that now. Maybe that’s a proud brand to have. I don’t know. I am really curious about where you go from here.[Music]Rosin: Lauren, of course, is not trying to say that he shouldn’t be punished at all. She voted to convict, after all. So what is her queasy feeling? Is it a “zoom in, zoom out” thing, like a lot of us would feel bad for a defendant if we were on their jury and got to know them better? Or are the January 6 prosecutions just a really unusual set of circumstances that we don’t have a box for yet?What I took away was: There is something about the ratio of crime to punishment that wasn’t sitting well with Lauren. Of course, we now know she wasn’t the only one. The Supreme Court justices ruled seven months later that some of the January 6 defendants had been improperly charged with a felony of “obstructing an official proceeding.” Both Johnatakis and Nicole Reffitt’s husband, Guy, were charged with that felony. The government is reviewing their cases, along with the cases of the hundreds of defendants who were impacted by the ruling.At the vigil, by the way, Micki and company celebrated that Supreme Court ruling with champagne and cake.The defendant in Lauren’s case, Taylor Johnatakis, went straight to the D.C. jail. And then five months later, he appeared at his sentencing hearing. It seemed weird for Lauren Ober, Juror No. 3, to go, so I went instead.The defendant’s wife, Marie, sat in the row in front of me, surrounded by three of her five children. She looked tiny. People can get dwarfed by official proceedings. Plus, it had been raining hard that morning, so everyone seemed extra wilted. Micki sat a few rows behind, barely taking her eyes off Marie and the kids.After the prosecution and the defense made their cases, it was the judge’s turn to announce the sentence. But before doing that, he made an unusually long speech. His name is Judge Royce Lamberth. He’s a Reagan appointee who’s handled dozens of J6 cases. He described this defendant as always courteous and respectful. He said the defendant was not, quote, an “"inherently bad person.”He mentioned that he’d gotten 20 letters from family members about Johnatakis’s good character and that he’d read all of them. Some sample compliments from those letters, quote: “He is faithful to his wife and children. He’s faithful to God. He loves his brothers and sisters. We love him more than words can express.” And: “Never had a legal issue, outside a speeding ticket.”The judge said he’d even called one of the family members who’d written an especially good letter, which is wild. Can you imagine getting a phone call from a judge in D.C., out of the blue, who says, Hey, I’m about to send your relative to prison. I just wanted to talk to you about it? It was like this judge had a bit of that same queasy feeling that Lauren had had, because he went to such great lengths to explain his reasoning.And then the sentence. Counts one and two: 60 months. The defendant’s wife put her arm over her youngest son’s shoulder. Count three: 12 months. The son, who was just old enough to do math, started to cry. Plus 15 more months. Now Marie started to cry. 87 months total—more than seven years. That little son of theirs might be taller than his dad the next time they were home together.Okay, remember Lauren’s questions to me?Ober: What is your family gonna do now? And, you know, Now you’re forever, like, a January 6er. And you’re branded with that now. Maybe that’s a proud brand to have. I don’t know.Rosin: Seeing Marie and her family in court made me want to know too.[Music]Rosin: Hi. Should I take my shoes off?Marie Johnatakis: Come in.Rosin: A couple of months after the sentencing, I visited Marie Johnatakis, the defendant’s wife—the one who’d cried in the courtroom—at their family home in Washington State. When I was planning the trip, my editor reminded me of the usual travel-danger precautions: Be careful. Make sure someone always knows where you are, which, when I got there, was pretty funny.The vibe in this house was so powerfully “mom’s in charge.” Like, the thing of note was how all the toys and kid things were so neatly put away and organized in baskets.Rosin: Why is it so neat? You have five children.Marie Johnatakis: Yes. So these are our things, but there’s a lot—Rosin: This house, an oversized actual log cabin set back on a woodsy road, where they had raised and homeschooled those five children, felt so far away from January 6 and jail and D.C. courtrooms that it made me want to know what her reality was on the day that her husband was standing in front of the Capitol with that bullhorn.Rosin: Did you guys watch it on TV? Like, did the kids know what was going on?Marie Johnatakis: We did not watch it on TV. We were doing other stuff. I’m trying to even remember the weather for that day, but probably would have been kids playing Legos, big kids probably hanging out with other big kids.Rosin: And what are you doing?Marie Johnatakis: I’m just taking care of all the kids, cooking dinner, cooking lunch. (Laughs.)Rosin: The feminist thought did occur to me at this moment that one way to see some of these J6 cases is that the men were out enacting their 1776 fantasy while the women were home putting away the Legos. And there was plenty of evidence of that in this case. Remember how Lauren and I went away for Thanksgiving right after the trial?Well, that meant that Taylor, the husband and father, was in D.C. at his trial just before Thanksgiving. And his wife, Marie, was home with their five kids, planning the holiday dinner, which she just assumed her husband would be home for—because she somehow thought that even if he did get convicted, he would be able to wait for his sentencing at home.Marie Johnatakis: It was really surprising that they took him into custody then. And I just remember thinking, like, He’s not a danger. He’s been out this whole time. Can you please just let us? You know, we just need a little more help. (Cries.)But anyways, so when he didn’t fly back home, it was one of those things that it’s like, Okay. It’s me.Rosin: And then to cap it off, on the morning of Christmas Eve, the family walked downstairs to discover that their dog had died. He’d stopped eating when dad left.Rosin: Oh, come on. I mean, My dog died on Christmas Eve is, like—Marie Johnatakis: It’s the worst country song you’ve ever heard. The worst one. (Laughs.) My husband’s in jail, and my dog is dead.Rosin: And it’s Christmas Eve—Marie Johnatakis: And it’s Christmas Eve.Rosin: Yeah.Marie Johnatakis: Oh. (Sighs.) So yeah—it is pretty pitiful. (Laughs.)Rosin: Yeah. That’s almost so bad that you have to laugh.Marie Johnatakis: You have to laugh. You have to laugh.Rosin: Yeah. Exactly.Rosin: So here she was: no husband, no dog, no steady paycheck, and not enough savings, which likely meant they would have to sell this beautiful house. That’s why the toys were extra neatly arranged when we came over—they were staging the house for potential buyers.Taylor didn’t explicitly choose his ideals over his family, but that was kind of the end result. Like, he could have plead guilty, which would have probably cut his sentence in half. Or he could have gotten a lawyer, instead of representing himself. But he took none of those roads, and now she had seven years of: Okay. It’s just me.Rosin: Was there a moment where you were ever mad at him?Marie Johnatakis: I don’t think so. I think that, you know, I’ve known Taylor for a really long time, because we’ve been married 19 years. And he has a really, really good heart. And he’s motivated by things that I think are noble.And so I know this is going to be kind of hard to understand, but if you can imagine, like, a place where, let’s say, you were really convinced that, you know, the election was—like, there were problems with it, and maybe it was enough to stand up for it. And I don’t know if this is skewed as far as, like, my idea on this, but there’s a lot of times that people stood up for things, and it cost them dearly. And while it almost sounds bombastic to think that this could be something like that—like, he said enough times, I wish I hadn’t have gone.But some of me thinks, like—I mean, who does stand up for it? Who does say, Hey. There’s a problem here? And at some point, there are casualties. I don’t know, all the woulda, shoulda, couldas. I’m like, I wish they would have—because he had a bullhorn, I’m like, Tell the guy in the bullhorn to shut up. (Laughs.) He would have listened.[Music]Rosin: And this was the beautiful, terrible exchange that brought me to human empathy and then deposited me at a dead end—because the couple had doubled down on their doubts about the election watching Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2000 Mules, a garbage film full of conspiracies and lies. And that had prompted them to think everything involving the government was rigged, including his trial, which is why he went about it in the weird, self-defeating way he did.And yet she had explained her position to me with such gentleness and humility—with humor, for God’s sake—even leaving room for my doubts, that I had nowhere left to go. I totally understood her position. And also, I totally didn’t.I did have one more thing to say, though.Rosin: Okay. Here is my moment to tell you a difficult thing.Marie Johnatakis: Okay.Rosin: Okay. The reason I know about Taylor’s case is because my partner, also my partner on this project, was on the jury.Marie Johnatakis: Okay.Rosin: Questions?Marie Johnatakis: Question? I don’t think so. No. I don’t think so.Rosin: You sure?Marie Johnatakis: Yeah. What questions should I ask, Hanna?Rosin: I wouldn’t want to—I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to meet someone who was close, even if it’s a step removed, to someone who helped put my husband in the position or who participated in that in every way. I think that could be a hard thing to hear.Marie Johnatakis: Yeah. No. You know, we went to the sentencing, and I watched the judge up there, you know, playing his role and the prosecution doing their role. And it just—I don’t know. I just felt a lot of compassion towards them all, because everybody is playing the part that they have been asked to play, including your partner. And I think that we all just do our best.Rosin: Before I left, she told me if I had any guilt about it, I should let it go. A couple of weeks after our visit, she wrote about our conversation on her blog: “I remember praying during the trial that someone on the jury would not convict…just one person. I prayed so hard for that. She,” and she means Lauren here, “could have been that one. And yet—I still can’t find it in my heart to be angry—it’s just not there.”[Music]Rosin: The J6 judges have found themselves in a tough spot. Lamberth, the judge in Johnatakis’s case, is a Republican appointee, remember. Still, he and his colleagues have taken heat from Republicans.Since the J6 cases have been going through the courts, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, the House Republican Conference chair, and Republican Congressman Jim Jordan from Ohio have repeatedly filed complaints against the D.C. circuit for “corruption” and “bias.”[Music]Rosin: And then, just before Johnatakis’s sentencing hearing, Stefanik took it a little further. She, too, started referring to the January 6 prisoners, many of whom had been sentenced by Lamberth and his colleagues, as “hostages.” Here’s what she said.Elise Stefanik: I have concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages. I have concerns. We have a role in Congress of oversight over our treatments of prisoners. And I believe that we’re seeing the weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump. But we’re seeing it against conservatives. We’re seeing it against Catholics.”Rosin: I have no proof of this, but maybe that’s what Lamberth had in mind when he was writing that letter he read at the sentencing hearing that he sent to Johnatakis’s family.He wrote, “Political violence rots republics. Therefore, January 6 must not become a precedent for further violence against political opponents or governmental institutions. This is not normal.”Ober: In our next episode: what happened inside the D.C. jail’s “Patriot Pod.” And our tour guide: a young troll or maybe a true radical.Brandon Fellows: He said, Hey. I’m the guy that they accused of killing Officer Sicknick. I’m like, No way!Ober: We Live Here Now is a production of The Atlantic. The show was reported, written, and executive produced by me, Lauren Ober, and Hanna Rosin. Our managing producer is Rider Alsop. Our senior producer is Ethan Brooks. Original scoring, sound design, and mix engineering by Brendan Baker.This series was edited by Scott Stossel and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Art direction by Colin Hunter. Project management by Nancy DeVille.The Atlantic’s executive editor is Adrienne LaFrance. Jeffrey Goldberg is The Atlantic’s editor in chief.

Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump’s second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington’s historic accomplishments—his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington’s most important contribution to the nation he liberated.“He went home,” Kelly said.The message was unambiguous. After leaving the White House, Kelly had described Trump as a “person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.” At Mount Vernon, he was making a clear point: People who are mad for power are a mortal threat to democracy. They may hold different titles—even President—but at heart they are tyrants, and all tyrants share the same trait: They never voluntarily cede power.The American revolutionaries feared a powerful executive; they had, after all, just survived a war with a king. Yet when the Founders gathered in 1787 to draft the Constitution, they approved a powerful presidential office, because of their faith in one man: Washington.Washington’s life is a story of heroic actions, but also of temptations avoided, of things he would not do. As a military officer, Washington refused to take part in a plot to overthrow Congress. As a victorious general, he refused to remain in command after the war had ended. As president, he refused to hold on to an office that he did not believe belonged to him. His insistence on the rule of law and his willingness to return power to its rightful owners—the people of the United States—are among his most enduring gifts to the nation and to democratic civilization.Forty-four men have succeeded Washington so far. Some became titans; others finished their terms without distinction; a few ended their service to the nation in ignominy. But each of them knew that the day would come when it would be their duty and honor to return the presidency to the people.All but one, that is.Donald Trump and his authoritarian political movement represent an existential threat to every ideal that Washington cherished and encouraged in his new nation. They are the incarnation of Washington’s misgivings about populism, partisanship, and the “spirit of revenge” that Washington lamented as the animating force of party politics. Washington feared that, amid constant political warfare, some citizens would come to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment.Today, America stands at such a moment. A vengeful and emotionally unstable former president—a convicted felon, an insurrectionist, an admirer of foreign dictators, a racist and a misogynist—desires to return to office as an autocrat. Trump has left no doubt about his intentions; he practically shouts them every chance he gets. His deepest motives are to salve his ego, punish his enemies, and place himself above the law. Should he regain the Oval Office, he may well bring with him the experience and the means to complete the authoritarian project that he began in his first term.Many Americans might think of George Washington as something like an avatar, too distant and majestic to be emulated. American culture has encouraged this distance by elevating him beyond earthly stature: A mural in the Capitol Rotunda depicts him literally as a deity in the clouds. In the capital city that bears Washington’s name, other presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson are represented with human likenesses; Franklin D. Roosevelt even smiles at us from his wheelchair. Washington is represented by a towering, featureless obelisk. Such faceless abstractions make it easy to forget the difficult personal choices that he made, decisions that helped the United States avoid the many curses that have destroyed other democracies.For decades, I taught Washington’s military campaigns and the lessons of his leadership to military officers when I was a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. And yet I, too, have always felt a distance from the man himself. In recent months, I revisited his life. I read his letters, consulted his biographers, and walked the halls at Mount Vernon. I found a man with weaknesses and shortcomings, but also a leader who possessed qualities that we once expected—and should again demand—from our presidents, especially as the United States confronts the choice between democracy and demagoguery.The votes cast in November will be more consequential than those in any other American election in more than a century. As we judge the candidates, we should give thought to Washington’s example, and to three of Washington’s most important qualities and the traditions they represent: his refusal to use great power for his own ends, his extraordinary self-command, and, most of all, his understanding that national leaders in a democracy are only temporary stewards of a cause far greater than themselves.IA CITIZEN, NOT A CAESARPopular military leaders can become a menace to a democratic government if they have the loyalty of their soldiers, the love of the citizenry, and a government too weak to defend itself. Even before his victory in the Revolutionary War, Washington had all of these, and yet he chose to be a citizen rather than a Caesar.It is difficult, in our modern era of ironic detachment and distrust, to grasp the intensity of the reverence that surrounded the General (as he would be called for the rest of his life) wherever he went. “Had he lived in the days of idolatry,” a Pennsylvania newspaper stated breathlessly during the war, Washington would have “been worshiped as a god.” He was more than a war hero. In 1780, when Washington passed through a town near Hartford, Connecticut, a French officer traveling with him recorded the scene:We arrived there at night; the whole of the population had assembled from the suburbs, we were surrounded by a crowd of children carrying torches, reiterating the acclamations of the citizens; all were eager to approach the person of him whom they called their father, and pressed so closely around us that they hindered us from proceeding.Washington was addressed—by Americans and visiting foreigners alike—as “Your Excellency” almost as often as he was by his rank. In Europe, a French admiral told him, he was celebrated as the “deliverer of America.” Alexander Hamilton, his aide-de-camp during the war, later described Washington as a man “to whom the world is offering incense.”At the war’s outset, Washington had believed that defeat and death—whether on the battlefield or on a gibbet in London—were more likely than glory. He worried that his wife, Martha, might also face threats from British forces, and was so concerned about her reaction to his appointment as commander of the Continental Army that he waited days before writing to tell her about it. Patrick Henry described a chance encounter with Washington on the street in Philadelphia, shortly after the vote approving Washington’s command. Tears welled in the new general’s eyes. “Remember, Mr. Henry, what I now tell you,” Washington said. “From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.”Instead, Washington’s reputation grew. Yet despite his surprising successes as a general and his rise as the symbol of American liberty, he never allowed the world’s incense to intoxicate him. Although he was a man of fierce ambition, his character was tempered by humility and bound up in his commitment to republican ideals: He led an American army only in the name of the American people and its elected representatives, and he never saw that army as his personal property. His soldiers were citizens, like him, and they were serving at his side in a common cause. “When we assumed the soldier,” he said to a group of New York representatives shortly before he took command, “we did not lay aside the citizen,” a sentiment that he repeated throughout the war.In the 18th century, Washington’s deference to the people’s representatives and the rule of law would have seemed almost nonsensical to his European counterparts. Most military officers of the time served for life, after swearing allegiance to royal sovereigns whose authority was said to be ordained by God. Often drawn from the ranks of the nobility, they saw themselves as a superior caste and found little reason to assure civilians of their good intentions.Washington, however, insisted that his men conduct themselves like soldiers who tomorrow would have to live with the people they were defending today. Despite continual supply shortages, he forbade his troops from plundering goods from the population—including from his Tory adversaries. Washington’s orders were prudent in the short term; his army needed both supplies and the goodwill of the people. But they also represented his careful investment in America’s future: Once the war was over, the new nation would depend on comity and grace among all citizens, regardless of what side they’d supported. The painter John Trumbull’s depiction of George Washington resigning his military commission to Congress in 1783 (World History Archive / Alamy) Most American presidents have had some sort of military experience. A few, like Washington, were genuine war heroes. All of them understood that military obedience to the rule of law and to responsible civilian authority is fundamental to the survival of democracy. Again, all of them but one.During his term as president, Trump expected the military to be loyal—but only to him. He did not understand (or care) that members of the military swear an oath to the Constitution, and that they are servants of the nation, not of one man in one office. Trump viewed the military like a small child surveying a shelf of toy soldiers, referring to “my generals” and ordering up parades for his own enjoyment and to emphasize his personal control.Trump was more than willing to turn the American military against its own people. In 2020, for instance, he wanted the military to attack protesters near the White House. “Beat the fuck out of them,” the president told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. “Just shoot them.” Both Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper (a former military officer himself) talked their boss out of opening fire on American citizens.[From the November 2023 issue: How Mark Milley held the line]Senior officers during Trump’s term chose loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to Donald Trump and remained true to Washington’s legacy. Such principles baffle Trump—all principles seem to baffle Trump, and he especially does not understand patriotism or self-sacrifice. He is, after all, the commander in chief who stood in Arlington National Cemetery, looked around at the honored dead in one of the country’s most sacred places, and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”A year ago, Trump suggested that Milley should be executed for actions he’d taken in uniform, including reassuring China of America’s political stability both before and after January 6, 2021. Esper has said that he thinks he and Milley, along with other senior defense officials and military officers, could be arrested and imprisoned if Trump returns to office. In a second term, Trump would appoint senior military leaders willing to subvert the military and the Constitution to serve his impulses. He already tried, in his first term, to bring such people to the White House, naming Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, for example, as his national security adviser. Flynn was fired after only 23 days for misleading White House officials about lying to the FBI and now travels the country promoting outlandish conspiracy theories. Trump has praised Flynn and promised to bring him back in a second term.Trump is desperate to reclaim power, and he is making threats about what could happen if the American people refuse to give it to him. Washington, even before he became president, was offered an almost certain chance to take ultimate power, and he refused.In 1783, Washington was camped with most of the Continental Army in Newburgh, New York. Congress, as usual, was behind on its financial obligations to American soldiers, and rumbles were spreading that it was time to take matters into military hands. Some men talked of deserting and leaving the nation defenseless. Others wanted to head to Philadelphia, disband Congress, and install Washington as something like a constitutional monarch.Washington allowed the soldiers to meet so they could discuss their grievances. Then he unexpectedly showed up at the gathering and unloaded on his men. Calling the meeting itself “subversive of all order and discipline,” he reminded them of the years of loyalty and personal commitment to them. He blasted the dark motives of a letter circulating among the troops, written by an anonymous soldier, that suggested that the army should refuse to disarm if Congress failed to meet their needs. “Can he be,” Washington asked, “a friend to the army? Can he be a friend to this country?”Then, in a moment of calculated theater meant to emphasize the toll that eight years of war had taken on him, he reached into his pocket for a pair of eyeglasses, ostensibly to read a communication from a member of Congress. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you must pardon me, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” Some of the men, already chastened by Washington’s reproaches, broke into tears. The Newburgh conspiracy, from that moment, was dead.The presidential historian Stephen Knott told me that Washington could have walked into that same meeting and, with a nod of his head, gained a throne. “A lesser man might have been tempted to lead the army to Philadelphia and pave the way for despotism,” Knott said. Instead, Washington crushed the idea and shamed the conspirators.Nine months later, Washington stood in the Maryland statehouse, where Congress was temporarily meeting, and returned control of the army to the elected representatives of the United States of America. He asked to be granted “the indulgence of retiring from the service of my country” and handed over the document containing his military commission. Washington, in the words of the historian Joseph Ellis, had completed “the greatest exit in American history.” Jean-Antoine Houdon’s sculpture of George Washington makes explicit reference to the Roman military leader Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who relinquished power and returned to his farm after delivering victory on the battlefield. (iStock / Getty) Decades ago, the scholar S. E. Finer asked a question that shadows every civilian government: “Instead of asking why the military engage in politics, we ought surely ask why they ever do otherwise.” The answer, at least in the United States, lies in the traditions instituted by Washington. Because of his choices during and after the Revolution, the United States has had the luxury of regarding military interference in its politics as almost unthinkable. If Trump returns to office with even a handful of praetorians around him, Americans may realize only too late what a rare privilege they have enjoyed.IIA MAN IN COMMAND OF HIMSELFWashington’s steadfast refusal to grasp for power was rooted not only in his civic beliefs, but also in a strength of character that Americans should demand in any president.When he returned to Mount Vernon after the war, Washington thought he was returning permanently to the life of a Virginia planter. His mansion is small by modern standards, and his rooms have a kind of placidity to them, a sense of home. If you visited without knowing who once lived there, you could believe that you were wandering the property of any moderately successful older gentleman of the colonial era, at least until you noticed little details, such as the key to the Bastille—a gift from Washington’s friend the Marquis de Lafayette—hanging in the hall.The estate is lovingly cared for today, but in 1783, after nearly a decade of Washington’s absence, it was a mess, physically and financially. Its fields and structures were in disrepair. Washington, who had refused a salary for his military service, faced significant debts. (When Lafayette invited him in 1784 to visit France and bask in its adulation, Washington declined because he couldn’t afford the trip.)[Barton Gellman: What happened to Michael Flynn?]But Washington’s stretched finances did not matter much to the people who showed up regularly at his door to seek a moment with the great man—and a night or two at his home. Customs of the time demanded that proper visitors, usually those with an introduction from someone known to the householder, were to be entertained and fed. Washington observed these courtesies as a matter of social duty, even when callers lacked the traditional referral. More than a year would pass after his return to Mount Vernon before he and Martha finally enjoyed a dinner alone.Like many of the other Founders, Washington embraced the virtues of the ancient Stoic thinkers, including self-control, careful introspection, equanimity, and dispassionate judgment. He tried to overcome petty emotions, and to view life’s difficulties and triumphs as merely temporary conditions.In the words of his vice president, John Adams, Washington had “great self-command”—the essential quality that distinguished him even among the giants of the Revolution and made him a model for future generations of American political and military leaders. Like anyone else, of course, he was beset by ordinary human failings. As his letters and the accounts of friends and family reveal, he was at times seized by vanity, anxiety, and private grievances. He was moody. His occasional bursts of temper could be fearsome. He never forgot, and rarely forgave, personal attacks.But Washington was “keenly aware” of his own shortcomings, Lindsay Chervinsky, the director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, told me, and this self-knowledge, bolstered by his sense of personal honor, governed nearly all of Washington’s actions. He rarely allowed his pride to congeal into arrogance, nor his insecurities to curdle into self-pity. He refused to carry on public feuds—or to tilt the power he held against those who had slighted him.Washington’s embrace of Stoicism helped him to step outside himself and confront the snares of his own ego and appetites, and especially to resist many of the temptations of power. His favorite play, Cato, was about Cato the Younger, a noted Stoic thinker and Roman senator who opposed the rise of Julius Caesar. Washington studied the examples of the great Roman republicans, particularly the story of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman military leader who saved his nation on the battlefield and then returned to his farm. (Washington would later serve as the first president of the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization of Revolutionary War veterans.) As the president and CEO of Mount Vernon, Douglas Bradburn, told me during a visit to the estate, Washington genuinely regarded the Roman general as an example to be followed.The Stoic insistence on merciless honesty, both with oneself and with others, is what allowed Washington to act with vigor but without venom, to make decisions without drama—another of the many grim differences between the character of the first president and that of the 45th. The Washington biographer Ron Chernow writes that “there was cunning in Washington’s nature but no low scheming. He never reneged on promises and was seldom duplicitous or underhanded. He respected the public” and “did not provoke people needlessly.” He desired recognition of his service, but hated boasting.Americans have long prized these qualities in their best presidents. Trump has none of them.Washington’s personal code had one severe omission. I had to take only a short walk from the mansion at Mount Vernon to see the reconstructed living quarters of some of the 300 enslaved people who worked his fields. Like other southern Founders, Washington did not let his commitment to freedom interfere with his ownership of other human beings. His views on slavery changed over time, especially after he commanded Black troops in battle, and he arranged in his will to free his slaves. But to the end of his life, Washington mostly left his thoughts on the institution out of public debates: His goal was to build a republic, not to destroy slavery. He did not right all the wrongs around him, nor all of his own.But Washington did set the standard of patriotic character for his successors. Some failed this test, and long before Trump’s arrival, other presidents endured harsh criticism for their belligerence and imperious ego. Andrew Jackson, for example, was a coarse and rabid partisan who infuriated his opponents; the New York jurist James Kent in 1834 excoriated him as “a detestable, ignorant, reckless, vain and malignant tyrant,” the product of a foolish experiment in “American elective monarchy.”Many presidents, however, have emulated Washington in various ways. We rightly venerate the wartime leadership of men such as Lincoln and FDR, but others also undertook great burdens and made hard decisions selflessly and without complaint.When a 1980 mission to liberate American hostages held in Iran ended in flames and the death of eight Americans in the desert, President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation. “It was my decision,” he said, both to attempt a rescue and to cancel the operation when it became impossible to continue. “The responsibility is fully my own.” Almost 20 years earlier, John F. Kennedy had taken the heat for the disastrous effort to land an anti-Communist invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, when he could have shifted blame to his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, from whom he’d inherited the plan. The day after JFK was assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson began his tenure as president not by affirming his new power, but by convening Kennedy’s Cabinet and affirming instead the slain president’s greatness. He asked them all to stay on. “I rely on you,” he said. “I need you.”Gerald Ford ended up in the Oval Office due to the failures of Richard Nixon, unelected and with no popular mandate to govern. And yet, at a time of great political and economic stress, he led the nation steadily and honorably. He pardoned Nixon because he thought it was in the nation’s best interest to end America’s “long national nightmare,” despite knowing that he would likely pay a decisive price at the polls.President Joe Biden displayed a common sentiment with these leaders when he declined to run for reelection in July. Biden, reportedly hurt that he was being pushed to step aside, nonetheless put defeating Trump above his own feelings and refused to exhibit any bitterness. “I revere this office,” he told the nation, “but I love my country more.”None of these men was perfect. But they followed Washington’s example by embracing their duty and accepting consequences for their decisions. (Even Nixon chose to resign rather than mobilize his base against his impeachment, a decision that now seems noble compared with Trump’s entirely remorseless reaction to his two impeachments, his inability to accept his 2020 loss, and his warnings of chaos should he lose again.) They refused to present themselves as victims of circumstance. They reassured Americans that someone was in charge and willing to take responsibility.Trump is unlike all of the men who came before him. Among his many other ignoble acts, he will be remembered for uttering a sentence, as thousands of Americans fell sick and died during a pandemic, that would have disgusted Washington and that no other American president has ever said, nor should ever say again: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”IIIA PRESIDENT, NOT A KINGOne of the defining characteristics of Washington’s approach to the presidency was that he was always trying to leave it. He had been drawn back into public life reluctantly, attending and presiding over the 1787 Constitutional Convention only after a violent tax revolt in Massachusetts, known as Shays’s Rebellion, convinced him that the republic was still fragile and in need of a more capable system of government. Washington returned to Mount Vernon after the meeting in Philadelphia, but he already knew from discussions at the convention that he would be asked to stand for election to the new presidency as America’s only truly unifying figure. His 1789 victory in the Electoral College was unanimous.Washington had no intention of remaining president for the rest of his life, even if some of his contemporaries had other ideas. “You are now a king under a different name,” Washington’s aide James McHenry happily wrote to him after that first election, but Washington was determined to serve one term at most and then go back to Mount Vernon. In the end, he would be persuaded to remain for a second term by Hamilton, Jefferson, and others who said that the new nation needed more time to solidify under his aegis. (“North and south,” Jefferson told him, “will hang together if they have you to hang on.”) An 1895 engraving of Shays’s Rebellion. The violent tax revolt convinced Washington that the United States was still fragile and drew him back into public life. (M&N / Alamy) As he assumed the presidency, Washington was concerned that even a whiff of kingly presumption could sink America’s new institutions. Lindsay Chervinsky told me that Washington doubted the judgment and prudence of Vice President Adams not only because the vocal and temperamental Bostonian generally irritated him—Adams irritated many of his colleagues—but also because he had proposed bloated and pretentious titles for the chief executive, such as “His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties.” Washington preferred the simpler title adopted by the House of Representatives: “President of the United States.”The American people trusted Washington, but they didn’t trust an embryonic government created in a matter of months by a small group of men in Philadelphia. (When Washington took office, Rhode Island and North Carolina hadn’t even ratified the Constitution yet.) The first president sought to allay these suspicions by almost immediately undertaking a kind of reassurance tour, traveling throughout the states—the Virginian shrewdly chose to start in New England—to show Americans that the Constitution and the nation’s commander in chief were not threats to their liberties.Donald Trump also traveled America once he was elected. After one of the most divisive presidential contests in modern American history, Trump embarked on a kind of victory tour through the states that had voted for him, and only those states. His campaign called it a “thank you” tour, but Trump’s speeches—praising his supporters, bashing his enemies—left no doubt about his intentions. “We are really the people who love this country,” he told a crowd in Mobile, Alabama. He was assuring his followers that although he now had to govern the entire nation, he was their president, an insidious theme that would lead directly to the tragic events of January 6.In his first years in office, Washington could have shaped the new presidency to his liking. His fellow Founders left much in Article II of the Constitution vague; they disagreed among themselves about the powers that the executive branch should hold, and they were willing to let Washington fill in at least some of the blanks regarding the scope of presidential authority. This choice has bedeviled American governance, allowing successive chief executives to widen their own powers, especially in foreign policy. Recently, the Supreme Court further loosened the constraints of the office, holding in Trump v. United States that presidents have immunity for anything that could be construed as an “official act.” This decision, publicly celebrated by Trump, opens frightening opportunities for presidents to rule corruptly and with impunity.Washington fought for the office rather than its occupant. Sharply cognizant that his every action could constitute a precedent, he tried through his conduct to imbue the presidency with the strength of his own character. He took pains not to favor his relatives and friends as he made political appointments, and he shunned gifts, fearing that they might be seen as bribes. He mostly succeeded: Those who came after him were constrained by his example, even if at times unwillingly, at least until the election of 2016.Washington believed that the American people had the right to change their Constitution, but he had absolutely no tolerance for insurrectionists who would violently defy its authority. During his first term, Congress passed a new tax on distilled spirits, a law that sparked revolts among farmers in western Pennsylvania. What began as sporadic clashes grew into a more cohesive armed challenge to the authority of the United States government—the largest, as Ron Chernow noted, until the Civil War. In September 1794, Washington issued an official proclamation that this “Whiskey Rebellion” was an act of “treasonable opposition.” The issue, he declared, was “whether a small portion of the United States shall dictate to the whole Union.” He warned other Americans “not to abet, aid, or comfort the insurgents.”In a show of force, Washington took personal command of a militia of more than 12,000 men and began a march to Carlisle, Pennsylvania—the only time a sitting president has ever led troops in the field. He had no wish to shed American blood, but he was ready to fight, and the rebellion dissipated quickly in the face of this military response. Later, in the first use of the pardon power, Washington spared two of the insurgents from the death penalty, but only after the legal system had run its course and they had been convicted of treason.As the president’s second term neared its end, his advisers again implored him to remain in office, and again argued that the republic might not survive without him. Washington, his health fading and his disillusionment with politics growing, held firm this time. He was going back to Virginia. As with his retirement from military life, his voluntary relinquishment of power as head of state was an almost inconceivable act at the time.In his farewell to the American people, the retiring president acknowledged that he had likely made errors in office, but hoped that his faults would “be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.” In March 1797, the man who had sacrificed so much for his country that he had to borrow money to get to his first inauguration left Philadelphia as a private citizen. Less than three years later, he was dead.IVWASHINGTON BETRAYEDIn a 2020 book about the first president, the historian Peter Henriques wrote that Washington “proved that his truest allegiance was to the republic by voluntarily surrendering power. It was the first of many peaceful transfers of power in the unprecedented American experiment.” Less than a year after the book’s publication, however, Trump would subvert this centuries-long tradition by summoning a mob against the elected representatives of the United States, after refusing to accept the result of the vote.Trump stood by as insurrectionists swarmed the House offices and even the Senate chamber itself on January 6, in an attempt to stop the certification of the election by Congress. Hours later, after one of the worst single days of casualties for law-enforcement officers since 9/11, Trump finally asked his supporters to go home. “I know your pain,” he said, his words only emphasizing the delusional beliefs of the rioters. “I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us.” He has since referred to the people convicted in American courts for their actions on January 6 as “patriots” and to those held in prison as “hostages.” He has promised to pardon them.[From the January/February 2022 issue: Trump’s next coup has already begun]Washington’s character and record ensured that almost any of his successors would seem smaller by comparison. But the difference between Washington and Trump is so immense as to be unmeasurable. No president in history, not even the worst moral weaklings among them, is further from Washington than Trump.Washington prized patience and had, as Adams put it, “the gift of silence”; Trump is ruled by his impulses and afflicted with verbal incontinence. Washington was uncomplaining; Trump whines incessantly. Washington was financially and morally incorruptible; Trump is a grifter and a crude libertine who still owes money to a woman he was found liable for sexually assaulting. Washington was a general of preternatural bravery who grieved the sacrifices of his men; Trump thinks that fallen soldiers are “losers” and “suckers.”Washington personally took up arms to stop a rebellion against the United States; Trump encouraged one.Some Americans seem unable to accept how much peril they face should Trump return, perhaps because many of them have never lived in an autocracy. They may yet get their chance: The former president is campaigning on an authoritarian platform. He has claimed that “massive” electoral fraud—defined as the vote in any election he loses—“allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” He refers to other American citizens as “vermin” and “human scum,” and to journalists as “enemies of the people.” He has described freedom of the press as “frankly disgusting.” He routinely attacks the American legal system, especially when it tries to hold him accountable for his actions. He has said that he will govern as a dictator—but only for a day.Trump is the man the Founders feared might arise from a mire of populism and ignorance, a selfish demagogue who would stop at nothing to gain and keep power. Washington foresaw the threat to American democracy from someone like Trump: In his farewell address, he worried that “sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction” would manipulate the public’s emotions and their partisan loyalties “to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”Many Americans in 2016 ignored this warning, and Trump engaged in the greatest betrayal of Washington’s legacy in American history. If given the opportunity, he would betray that legacy again—and the damage to the republic may this time be irreparable.This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Washington’s Nightmare.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In Tarragona, Spain, more than 40 teams of “castellers” recently gathered for the city’s 29th biannual human-tower competition—working together to build the highest and most complex human towers (castells). Winning teams reached as high as 10 tiers above the ground. Gathered here are some of the images of these amazing structures, and the effort involved in forming them.To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.

Dear James,My problem is my big mouth. A friend talks to me about his or her problems, and then I blurt them out to other people. This leads to more problems. I’d like to keep my mouth shut more often, but by nature I find it hard to be controlled and reserved and private. Can you help me?Dear Reader,I have this problem too. I’m not a gossip, and I’m not a fink/squealer/stool pigeon, but I do indulge the eros of indiscretion: I’m an oversharer. And sometimes, having limited resources, a finite number of shareables of my own, I might incline toward sharing somebody else’s. I might blab a bit. Which is not to say I can’t be trusted. Your secret is safe with me. But make sure you tell me it’s a secret.Why do we do this? Why do we blab? It’s a shortcut to intimacy, perhaps—to the kind of juicy mutuality that can be achieved only by an exchange of privileged info. Also: We have poor boundaries. Because we hate boundaries, don’t we? Those prissy, fussy, relationship-stunting boundaries. We want everything to be flowing and billowing and pouring unchecked from one soul to another, right? Blabbing is libidinal; blabbing is a release.But this is the real world, baby. Things collide. Things have sharp edges. The impulse to connect, which in this case is more of an impulse to dissolve, can get you in trouble. Other people are real. They have their own existence, even if they’re not currently in the room with us, and we need to be careful of their feelings. Like Morrissey says, “Heavy words are so lightly thrown.”You have self-awareness; that’s a start. More than a start: It’s the beginning of the answer. When you feel that saucy urge to blab rising within you, recognize it, acknowledge it, and then switch gears. Recite a poem instead. (I recommend the first verse of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.)Sincerely,JamesBy submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

The little clump of cells looked almost like a human embryo. Created from stem cells, without eggs, sperm, or a womb, the embryo model had a yolk sac and a proto-placenta, resembling a state that real human embryos reach after approximately 14 days of development. It even secreted hormones that turned a drugstore pregnancy test positive.To Jacob Hanna’s expert eye, the model wasn’t perfect—more like a rough sketch. It had no chance of developing into an actual baby. But in 2022, when two students burst into his office and dragged him to a microscope to show him the cluster of cells, he knew his team had unlocked a door to understanding a crucial stage of human development. Hanna, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, also knew that the model would raise some profound ethical questions.You might recall images of embryonic development from your high-school biology textbook: In a predictable progression, a fertilized egg morphs into a ball of cells, then a bean-shaped blob, and then, ultimately, something that looks like a baby. The truth is, though, that the earliest stages of human development are still very much a mystery. Early-stage embryos are simply too small to observe with ultrasound; at 14 days, they are just barely perceptible to the naked eye. Keeping them alive outside the body for that long is difficult. Whether anyone should is another matter—for decades, scientific policy and regulation has held 14 days as the limit for how long embryos can be cultured in a lab. Embryo models—that is, embryos created using stem cells—could provide a real alternative for studying some of the hardest problems in human development, unlocking crucial details about, say, what causes miscarriages and developmental disorders. In recent years, Hanna and other scientists have made remarkable progress in cultivating pluripotent stem cells to mimic the structure and function of a real, growing embryo. But as researchers solve technical problems, they are still left with moral ones. When is a copy so good that it’s equivalent to the real thing? And more to the point, when should the lab experiment be treated—legally and ethically—as human? Around the 14th day of embryonic development, a key stage in human growth called gastrulation kicks off. Cells begin to organize into layers that form the early buds of organs. The primitive streak—a developmental precursor of the spine—shows up. It is also at that point that an embryo can no longer become a twin. “You become an individual,” Jeremy Sugarman, a professor of bioethics and medicine at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, told me.[Read: A woman gave birth from an embryo frozen for 24 years]The primitive streak is the main rationale behind what is often referred to as the “14-day rule.” Many countries limit the amount of time that a human embryo can be kept alive in a petri dish to 14 days. When a U.K. committee recommended the 14-day limit in the 1980s, IVF, which requires keeping embryos alive until they are either transferred or frozen around day five or six, was still brand-new. The committee reasoned that 14 days was the last point at which an embryo could definitively be considered no more than a collection of cells, without potential individual identity or individual rights; because the central nervous system is formed after the 14-day milestone, they reasoned, there was no chance it could feel pain.But the recent rise of advanced embryo models has led some groups to start questioning the sanctity of the two-week mark. In 2021, the International Society for Stem Cell Research relaxed its 14-day guideline, saying that research could continue past 14 days depending on ethical review and national regulations. (The organization declined to set a new limit.) In July, U.K. researchers put out a similar set of guidelines specifically for models. Australia’s Embryo Research Licensing Committee, however, recently decided to treat more realistic models like the real deal, prohibiting them from developing past 14 days. In the United States, federal funding of human-embryo research has been prohibited since 1996, but no federal laws govern experiments with either real or model embryos. “The preliminary question is, are they embryos at all?” Hank Greely, a law professor and the director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University, told me. Allow one to develop further, and “maybe it grows a second head. We don’t know.” (Having a second head is not necessarily a reason to disqualify someone from being human.) In the absence of an ethical consensus, Hanna is at work trying to cultivate his models to the equivalent of day 21, roughly the end of gastrulation. So far, he said, he’s managed to grow them to about day 18.Researchers generally agree that today’s models show little risk of one day becoming walking, talking human beings. Combining sperm and eggs the old-fashioned way is already no guarantee of creating new life; even women in their 20s have only about a 25 percent chance of getting pregnant each month. Making embryos in a lab, sans the usual source material, is considerably harder. Right now, only about 1 percent of embryo models actually become anything that resembles an embryo, according to Hanna. And because scientists don’t have a great idea of what a nine-day-old embryo looks like inside the body, Greely said, they don’t actually know for certain whether the models are developing similarly.[Read: The most mysterious cells in our bodies don’t belong to us]And yet, in the past few years, scientists have already accomplished what seemed impossible not so long ago. Both Hanna and Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz, a developmental and stem-cell biologist at the California Institute for Technology and the University of Cambridge, have created models for mice with brains and beating hearts. Scientists and ethicists would be wise to consider what qualifies as human before human embryo models have beating hearts, too. The most important question, some ethicists argue, is not whether researchers can achieve a heartbeat in a petri dish, but whether they can achieve one with a model embryo implanted in a human womb. “It's no longer so much about how embryos are made or where they come from, but more what they can possibly do,” Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist and the director of life sciences at Boston’s Museum of Science told me. In an experiment published last year, seven-day-old model monkey embryos were successfully implanted in the uterus of three female monkeys. Signs of pregnancy disappeared about a week afterward, but the paper still raised the specter—or perhaps the promise—of a human version of the experiment.Building more realistic embryo models could have enormous benefits—starting with basic understanding of how embryos grow. A century ago, scientists collected thousands of embryo samples, which were then organized into 23 phases covering the first eight weeks of development. Those snapshots of development, known as the Carnegie stages, still form much of the basis for how early life is described in scientific texts. The problem is, “we don’t know what happens in between,” Hanna said. “To study development, you need the living material. You have to watch it grow.” Until recently, scientists had rarely sustained embryos in the lab past day seven or so, leaving manifold questions about development beyond the first week. Most developmental defects happen in the first trimester of pregnancy; for example, cleft palate, a potentially debilitating birth defect, occurs sometime before week nine for reasons that scientists don’t yet understand. It’s a mystery that more developmental research performed on embryo models could solve, Greely said.Better understanding the earliest stages of life could yield insights far beyond developmental disorders. It could help reveal why some women frequently miscarry, or have trouble getting pregnant at all. Żernicka-Goetz has grown models to study the amniotic cavity—when it forms improperly, she suspects, pregnancies may fail. Embryo models could also help explain how and why prenatal development is affected by viruses and alcohol—and, crucially, medications. Pregnant people are generally excluded from drug trials because of potential risks to the fetus, which leaves them without access to treatments for new and chronic health conditions. Hanna has started a company that aims, among other things, to test drug safety on embryo models. Hanna told me he also envisions an even more sci-fi future: treating infertility by growing embryo models to day 60, harvesting their ovaries, and then using the eggs for IVF. Because stem cells can be grown from skin cells, such a system could solve the problem of infertility caused by older eggs without the more invasive aspects of IVF, which requires revving the ovaries up with hormones and surgery to retrieve the resulting eggs.[Read: Christian parents have a blueprint for IVF]Answering at least some of these questions may not require hyperrealistic models of an embryo. Aryeh Warmflash, a biosciences professor at Rice University, is studying gastrulation, but the cells that form the placenta aren’t relevant to his research questions, so his models leave them out, he told me. “In some sense, the better your model goes, the more you have to worry,” he said. Hyun told me he cautions scientists against making extremely complex models in order to avoid triggering debate, especially in a country already divided by ideas about when life begins. But given all the medical advances that could be achieved by studying realistic models—all the unknowns that are beginning to seem knowable—it’s hard to imagine that everyone will follow his advice.