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theatlantic.com

Bringing a Social Movement to Life

The author Adam Hochschild recommends books that vividly illustrate moments of great change.

1 h

theatlantic.com

AI’s Unending Thirst

1 h

theatlantic.com

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.In last week’s newsletter, I described artificial intelligence as data-hungry. But the technology is also quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with.Karen Hao, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, recently visited one such data center in Goodyear, Arizona. Microsoft owns the facility, which may eventually use an estimated 56 million gallons of drinking water each year—“equivalent to the amount used by 670 Goodyear families,” Karen notes. No one’s at risk of going thirsty, but as Karen writes, “the supply of water in the region is quite limited, and the more that’s taken up by data centers, the less there is for, say, supplying tap water to new housing.”I followed up with Karen to ask about AI’s growing demands on our environment. It’s still a matter of debate whether the technology is truly worth its immense costs, even as tech companies commit more and more resources to it. How should we be thinking about all of this? “Companies are laying down data centers faster than ever in the race to build generative AI, but there has been very little accounting of their impacts on the environment,” Karen told me. “There’s a narrowing window in which the public should be asking: Is this what we want? Once the facilities have been built, it will be much more difficult to reverse the decision.”— Damon Beres, senior editor Illustration by Erik Carter AI Is Taking Water From the DesertBy Karen Hao One scorching day this past September, I made the dangerous decision to try to circumnavigate some data centers. The ones I chose sit between a regional airport and some farm fields in Goodyear, Arizona, half an hour’s drive west of downtown Phoenix. When my Uber pulled up beside the unmarked buildings, the temperature was 97 degrees Fahrenheit. The air crackled with a latent energy, and some kind of pulsating sound was emanating from the electric wires above my head, or maybe from the buildings themselves. With no shelter from the blinding sunlight, I began to lose my sense of what was real. Microsoft announced its plans for this location, and two others not so far away, back in 2019—a week after the company revealed its initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI, the buzzy start-up that would later release ChatGPT. From that time on, OpenAI began to train its models exclusively on Microsoft’s servers; any query for an OpenAI product would flow through Microsoft’s cloud-computing network, Azure. In part to meet that demand, Microsoft has been adding data centers at a stupendous rate, spending more than $10 billion on cloud-computing capacity in every quarter of late. One semiconductor analyst called this “the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen.” I’d traveled out to Arizona to see it for myself. The Goodyear site stretched along the road farther than my eyes could see. A black fence and tufts of desert plants lined its perimeter. I began to walk its length, clutching my phone and two bottles of water. According to city documents, Microsoft bought 279 acres for this location. For now, the plot holds two finished buildings, thick and squat, with vents and pipes visible along their sides. A third building is under construction, and seven more are on the way. Each will be decked out with rows of servers and computers that must be kept below a certain temperature. The complex has been designated partly for OpenAI’s use, according to a person familiar with the plan. (Both Microsoft and OpenAI declined to comment on this assertion.) And Microsoft plans to absorb its excess heat with a steady flow of air and, as needed, evaporated drinking water. Use of the latter is projected to reach more than 50 million gallons every year. Read the full article.What to Read Next Would limitlessness make us better writers?: “AI embodies hypotheticals I can only imagine for myself,” Rachel Khong writes. “But I believe human impediments are what lead us to create meaningful art.” Neal Stephenson’s most stunning prediction: “The sci-fi legend coined the term metaverse, but he was most prescient about our AI age,” Matteo Wong writes. P.S.Earlier this week, President Joe Biden signed legislation that could result in a TikTok ban if the app isn’t divested from its Chinese parent company. As Charlie Warzel writes for The Atlantic, this will be a more complicated process than it seems—particularly when it comes to the app’s powerful AI algorithm.— Damon

Trump’s Legal Argument Is a Path to Dictatorship

3 h

theatlantic.com

The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law.[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: A guide]“Trying to overthrow the Constitution and subvert the peaceful transfer of power is not an official act, even if you conspire with other government employees to do it and you make phone calls from the Oval Office,” Michael Waldman, a legal expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal public-policy organization, told me. Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him.The Supreme Court, however, does not need to accept Trump’s absurdly broad claim of immunity for him to prevail in his broader legal battle. Such a ruling might damage the image of the Court, which has already been battered by a parade of hard-right ideological rulings. But if Trump can prevail in November, delay is as good as immunity. The former president’s best chance at defeating the federal criminal charges against him is to win the election and then order the Justice Department to dump the cases. The Court could superficially rule against Trump’s immunity claim, but stall things enough to give him that more fundamental victory.If they wanted, the justices could rule expeditiously as well as narrowly, focusing on the central claim in the case and rejecting the argument that former presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president, without getting into which acts might qualify as official or not. Sauer also acknowledged under questioning by Justice Amy Coney Barrett that some of the allegations against Trump do not involve official acts but private ones, and so theoretically the prosecution could move ahead with those charges and not others. But that wouldn’t necessarily delay the trial sufficiently for Trump’s purposes.“On big cases, it’s entirely appropriate for the Supreme Court to really limit what they are doing to the facts of the case in front of it, rather than needing to take the time to write an epic poem on the limits of presidential immunity,” Waldman said. “If they write a grant opinion, saying no president is above the law, but it comes out too late in the year, they will have effectively immunized Trump from prosecution before the election while pretending not to.”Trump’s own attorneys argued in 2021, during his second impeachment trial, that the fact that he could be criminally prosecuted later was a reason not to impeach him. As The New York Times reported, Trump’s attorney Bruce Castor told Congress that “after he is out of office,” then “you go and arrest him.” Trump was acquitted in the Senate for his attempted coup after only a few Republicans voted for conviction; some of those who voted to acquit did so reasoning that Trump was subject to criminal prosecution as a private citizen. The catch-22 here reveals that the actual position being taken is that the president is a king, or that he is entitled to make himself one. At least if his name is Donald Trump.[David A. Graham: The Supreme Courts goes through the looking glass of presidential immunity]Democracy relies on the rule of law and the consent of the governed—neither of which is possible in a system where the president can commit crimes or order them committed if he feels like it. “We can’t possibly have an executive branch that is cloaked in immunity and still expect them to act in the best interests of the people in a functioning democracy,” Praveen Fernandes, the vice president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal legal organization, told me.The only part of Trump’s case that contains anything resembling a reasonable argument is the idea that without some kind of immunity for official acts, presidents could be prosecuted on a flimsy basis by political rivals. But this argument is stretched beyond credibility when it comes to what Trump did, which was to try repeatedly and in multiple ways to unlawfully seize power after losing an election. Even if the prospect of presidents being prosecuted for official acts could undermine the peaceful transfer of power, actually trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power is a much more direct threat—especially because it has already happened. But the Republican-appointed justices seemed much more concerned about the hypothetical than the reality.“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent,” Justice Samuel Alito asked, “will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”Trump has the conservative justices arguing that you cannot prosecute a former president for trying to overthrow the country, because then they might try to overthrow the country, something Trump already attempted and is demanding immunity for doing. The incentive for an incumbent to execute a coup is simply much greater if the Supreme Court decides that the incumbent cannot be held accountable if he fails. And not just a coup, but any kind of brazen criminal behavior. “The Framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to,” Kagan pointed out during oral arguments. “And, you know, not so surprising, they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?”At least a few of the right-wing justices seemed inclined to if not accept Trump’s immunity claim, then delay the trial, which would likely improve his reelection prospects. As with the Colorado ballot-access case earlier this year, in which the justices prevented Trump from being thrown off the ballot in accordance with the Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists holding office, the justices’ positions rest on a denial of the singularity of Trump’s actions.No previous president has sought to overthrow the Constitution by staying in power after losing an election. Trump is the only one, which is why these questions are being raised now. Pretending that these matters concern the powers of the presidency more broadly is merely the path the justices sympathetic to Trump have chosen to take in order to rationalize protecting the man they would prefer to be the next president. What the justices—and other Republican loyalists—are loath to acknowledge is that Trump is not being uniquely persecuted; he is uniquely criminal.This case—even more than the Colorado ballot-eligibility case—unites the right-wing justices’ political and ideological interests with Trump’s own. One way or another, they will have to choose between Trumpism and democracy. They’ve given the public little reason to believe that they will choose any differently than the majority of their colleagues in the Republican Party.

We’re All Reading Wrong

To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud.

3 h

theatlantic.com

Columbia University’s Impossible Position

4 h

theatlantic.com

At Columbia University, administrators and pro-Palestinian students occupying the main quad on campus are in a standoff. President Minouche Shafik has satisfied neither those clamoring for order nor those who want untrammeled protests. Yet a different leader may not have performed any better. The tensions here between free-speech values and antidiscrimination law are unusually complex and difficult, if not impossible, to resolve.Shafik presides over a lavishly funded center of research, teaching, civic acculturation, and student activism. Such institutions cannot thrive without strong free-speech cultures. Neither can they thrive without limits on when and where protests are permitted—especially when protesters disrupt the institution as a tactic to get what they want. As Shafik told Congress in recent testimony, “Trying to reconcile the free-speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination has been the central challenge on our campus, and many others, in recent months.”That is a formidable challenge. The best protest rules are viewpoint-neutral: They constrain equally, rather than coercively disadvantaging one side in a controversy. How strictly should they be enforced? Whatever the answer, it must apply equally to all students. Yet consistent support for viewpoint neutrality is rare inside and outside academia, especially on an issue as fraught as Israel-Palestine, which has divided Columbia’s faculty and students for decades.All of that context informed a flash point that occurred at Columbia last week: As Palestine-aligned protesters occupied the quad, where many activists covered their face to obscure their identity, Shafik declared, “I have determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.” After repeatedly warning students to leave and suspending them when they refused, she called the NYPD to remove them from campus, citing vague safety concerns.[George Packer: The campus-left occupation that broke higher education]Yet soon after, student activists reappeared on the quad. More activists gathered outside the school’s gates. Observers speculated about whether calling the cops unwittingly escalated the situation. Faculty critics who say Shafik went too far in contacting police held a walkout to show dissent. Some want to censure her for “violation of the fundamental requirements of academic freedom and shared governance, and her unprecedented assault on students’ rights.” Equally vocal critics believe that by not calling police back to campus, she failed to protect Jewish students and let Palestine-aligned activists break sound rules that must apply to everyone in order to be fair. Amid ongoing tumult, Columbia went “hybrid” for the rest of the semester. “Our preference,” Shafik said, “is that students who do not live on campus will not come to campus.”Columbia’s options are severely constrained because, for better or worse, it cannot merely start applying the viewpoint-neutral ethos that free-speech advocates prefer to these protests. Administrators must weigh the possibility that failing to more tightly regulate these protests could cause the school to be deemed in violation of antidiscrimination law because of their duration, their intensity, and their tenor, as well as pressure from state and federal officials concerned about anti-Semitism.In a social-media post referencing Columbia, Governor Kathy Hochul put it this way: “The First Amendment protects the right to protest but students also have a right to learn in an environment free from harassment or violence.” As if to underscore the challenge Columbia faces, Hochul misstates Columbia’s legal obligations. As a private university, it is not bound by the First Amendment.It is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which states that no person shall, on grounds of race or national origin, “be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under” a program receiving federal funds. To comply, Columbia needn’t be free of harassment. But it must address behavior of sufficient severity or persistence that members of a protected class are denied equal access to education because of their identity. Per current federal guidance, “students who are or are perceived to be Jewish” are covered, and national origin groups are explicitly protected, so Israeli nationals are covered too.In most campus free-speech disputes that I encounter, the relevant facts are easily grasped in a couple of days, if not a couple of hours. For example, I am confident that the University of Southern California transgressed against viewpoint neutrality when it canceled the valedictorian speech of a Palestine-aligned student, Asna Tabassum. I thought, let her speak. (Protests followed her removal, and USC has now canceled its entire main commencement ceremony.) But at Columbia, I cannot say with confidence whether, in my own free-speech-friendly interpretation of Title VI, Shafik is doing enough or too little to adhere to it.An example helps clarify the uncertainty here.If every day protesters on Columbia’s quad were blocking the path of all Jewish students as they tried to walk to class, or shouting ethnic slurs at any student they perceived to be Jewish, Columbia would clearly have a legal obligation to intervene in those protests. Whereas if one time, one protester acting alone blocked the path of one Jewish student, or shouted a slur at a Jewish student, Title VI would not compel Columbia to intervene in ongoing protests. So in between those poles, what is required? The answer is up for debate. Shafik is required to meet a murky legal standard amid protests that she can observe only in part, where a single violent act or viral clip of one charged moment could instantly alter public and official perception about six months of events.Even insiders charged with analyzing the matter are unsure about Columbia’s legal obligations. In March, a task force convened to study anti-Semitism at the institution released the first in a series of reports, titled “Columbia University’s Rules on Demonstrations.” After studying what antidiscrimination law might require, the report stated, “We urge the University to provide more guidance on the meaning of ‘discriminatory harassment,’ including antisemitic harassment.” It speculated that “at some point, courts and the Department of Education are likely to offer additional guidance.” Until then, it urged that “the University’s legal team should provide more guidance”—but Columbia’s legal team doesn’t have the answer either. Bureaucrats at the Department of Education regularly take extreme liberties in interpreting what antidiscrimination law means, with some conclusions shifting dramatically under different presidents.In theory, Title VI could be construed in a matter that reinforces the need for viewpoint neutrality: Israel- and Palestine-aligned students would each get no more and no less latitude to protest than Columbia would extend to any other group, regardless of how urgent or pointless, enlightened or abhorrent their position. In practice, counterfactuals cannot guide administrators or regulators, and as the Duke professor Timur Kuran observed on social media, students on both sides of the issue plausibly feel discriminated against by their universities, because “identity politics has inevitably led to arbitrariness and inconsistencies in applying rules.”In fact, it may be the case that Columbia is both failing to provide its Jewish students with equal access to its educational experience and (as the Knight Foundation has argued) engaging in viewpoint discrimination against Palestine-aligned students.Those who believe Columbia is overpolicing the Israel-Hamas protests should rationally desire reforms to Title VI, so that more campus speech is deemed acceptable. In reality, most social-justice-oriented faculty and students are either highly selective about whose controversial viewpoints they want protected or loath to recognize the long-standing conflict between tolerance for free speech and antidiscrimination law. Vilifying Shafik without acknowledging the regulatory environment she confronts is much easier.On the ideological right, meanwhile, is sudden zeal for draconian Department of Education enforcement of antidiscrimination law. “This is what’s known as a Title VI violation,” Ilya Shapiro of the Manhattan Institute posted Monday on social media. “Send in the National Guard and otherwise put Columbia and its morally bankrupt leadership into federal receivership.”[Adam Serwer: The Republicans who want American carnage]That is terrible advice, but stakeholders seem to disagree radically about the overall tenor of protests to date. Have they violated the Civil Rights Act as they’ve actually unfolded? The American Association of University Professors doesn’t seem to think so. In a recent statement, it declared that “Shafik’s silencing of peaceful protesters and having them hauled off to jail does a grave disservice to Columbia’s reputation and will be a permanent stain on her presidential legacy.” In contrast, as protesters flooded back onto campus Sunday, Jake Tapper of CNN reported that an Orthodox rabbi at Columbia sent a WhatsApp message to almost 300 Jewish students urging them to leave campus and go home because the institution “cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy.”Calls for Shafik to resign have come from people on both sides of the conflict. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson piled on. But under a new president all of the same challenges and constraints on resolving them would remain. Debate about Columbia would improve if it focused on the thorniest, most contested conflicts between protest rights and antidiscrimination law rather than imagining that a better leader could reconcile the most expansive versions of both projects.

The Eternal Letdown of Sugar Substitutes

4 h

theatlantic.com

A few months ago, my doctor uttered a phrase I’d long dreaded: Your blood sugar is too high. With my family history of diabetes, and occasional powerful cravings for chocolate, I knew this was coming and what it would mean: To satisfy my sweet fix, I’d have to turn to sugar substitutes. Ughhhh.Dupes such as aspartame, stevia, and sucralose (the main ingredient in Splenda) are sweet and have few or zero calories, so they typically don’t spike your blood sugar like the real thing. But while there are now more sugar alternatives than ever, many people find that they taste terrible. The aspartame in Diet Coke leaves the taste of pennies in my mouth. And in large amounts, substitutes are bad for you: Last year, the World Health Organization warned that artificial sweeteners could raise the risk of certain diseases, singling out aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic.”But last week, I sipped a can of Arnold Palmer with a brand-new sweetener that promised to be unlike all the rest. The drink’s strong lemon flavor was mellowed by a light, unremarkable sweetness that came from brazzein, a sugar substitute green-lighted by the FDA last month. Oobli, a California-based company that sells the lemonade-iced tea and manufactures brazzein (which occurs naturally in West Africa’s oubli fruit), has billed it as a “revolution in sweetness.” Yet like everything that came before it, brazzein is far from perfect: To help mask its off taste, the can had some real sugar in it too. For now, Eric Walters, a sweetener expert at Rosalind Franklin University, told me, brazzein is just “an alternative” to the many options that already exist. None has come even close to the real deal.The ideal sugar alternative is more than just sweet. It must also be safe, taste good, and replicate the distinct way sugar’s sweetness develops on the tongue. In addition to aspartame and other synthetic sugar alternatives that have existed for more than a century, the past two decades have brought “natural” ones that are plant-derived: sweeteners made with stevia or monk fruit, which the FDA first approved in 2008 and 2010, respectively, can now be readily found in beverages such as Truly hard seltzer and Fairlife protein shakes. Stevia and monk fruit have been used “for hundreds of years by the people who live in the regions where they grow, so I don’t have huge worries about their safety,” Walters told me.All of these sweeteners work in basically the same way. Chemically, molecules other than just sugar can bind to the tongue’s sweet receptors, signaling to the brain that something sweet has landed. But the brain can tell when that something is not sugar. So far, no sweetener has accomplished that trick; off flavors that sometimes linger always give away the ruse.The problem is that sugar alternatives are like celebrity impersonators: aesthetically similar, reasonably satisfying, but consistently disappointing. Take stevia and monk fruit: By weight, they’re intensely sweet relative to table sugar—monk fruit by a factor of up to 250 and stevia by a factor of up to 400. Because only a tiny amount is needed to impart a sweet taste, those sweeteners must be bulked up with another substance so they more closely resemble sugar granules. Manufacturers used to add carbohydrates such as corn starch—which are eventually broken down into sugars—but they now use erythritol, a calorie-free sugar alcohol, which “doesn’t count as sugar at all,” Walters said.The end products look and feel similar to sugar, but not without downsides. Erythritol has been linked to an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. And stevia and monk-fruit sweeteners come with an aftertaste that has been described as “bitter,” “unpleasant,” and “disastrous.” When Walters first helped produce stevia 35 years ago, “the taste quality was so awful that we thought no one would buy it,” he said. “But we underestimated how much people would put up with it because it was ‘natural.’”Brazzein is yet another natural option. Unlike other sugar substitutes, brazzein is a protein, but it is still intensely sweet and low in calories. It is so sweet—about 1,000 times sweeter than sugar—that some gorillas in the wild have learned not to waste their time eating it. That protein has become a health buzzword certainly won’t hurt Oubli’s sales, but its products won’t bolster any biceps: Its teas contain very little—about 1 percent—because brazzein’s sweetness is so potent.Last month, Oobli received a “no questions asked” letter from the FDA, which means that the agency isn’t concerned about the product’s safety. Oobli’s iced teas and chocolates are the first brazzein-sweetened products to be sold in the U.S., although the sweet protein was identified three decades ago. Thaumatin, another member of the sweet-protein family, has been in use since the 1970s, though mostly as a flavor enhancer. One reason it took brazzein so long to be marketable is that it occurs at such low levels in the oubli fruit that mass-producing it was inefficient. Instead of harvesting brazzein from fruit, Oubli grows the protein in yeast cells, which is more scalable and affordable, Jason Ryder, Oobli’s co-founder and chief technology officer, told me.One distinction between brazzein and other sweeteners is its chemical size. Compared with sugar, stevia, and monk fruit, brazzein molecules are relatively large because they are proteins, which means they aren’t metabolized in the same way, Ryder said. The effects of existing sweeteners on the body are still being investigated; although they are generally thought to not hike blood sugar or insulin, recent research suggests that they may in fact do so. That may never be a concern with brazzein, Grant DuBois, a sweetener expert and the chief science officer at Almendra, a stevia manufacturer, told me. The most compelling upside of brazzein may be that it tastes pretty good. My palate, which is extra sensitive to artificial sweeteners, wasn’t offended by the taste. Would drink again, I thought. But the glaring caveat with Oobli’s teas is that they do contain some actual sugar—just less than you’d expect from a regular drink. The sugar helps mitigate a less-than-ideal feature of brazzein’s sweetness, Ryder said.One of the enduring problems with brazzein and many other popular sugar alternatives is that their sweetness takes more time than usual to develop, then lingers longer than expected. Indeed, although I liked the Arnold Palmer as it went down, I felt a peculiar sensation afterward: a trace of sweetness at the back of my throat that intensified, and felt oddly cool, as I exhaled. It was not unpleasant, but it was also reminiscent of having accidentally swallowed minty gum. If Diet Coke were made with brazzein instead of aspartame, Walters explained, you’d taste caffeine’s bitterness and the tartness of phosphoric acid before any sweetness, and when all of those flavors dissipated, the sweetness would hang around. “It’s just not what you want your beverage to be,” he said.Balancing brazzein with a touch of sugar achieves the goal of reducing sugar intake. But most of the time, people who seek out products sweetened with sugar alternatives want “zero sugar,” DuBois said, “so that’s not really a great solution to the problem.” The perfect sweetener would wholly replace all of the sugar in a food, but brazzein probably won’t get there unless the peculiarities of its sweetness can be fully addressed. “If I knew how, I could probably make millions of dollars,” Walters said.The future of sugar substitutes may soon offer improvements rather than alternatives. Last year, DuBois and his colleagues at Almendra published a peer-reviewed paper describing a method to speed up slow-moving sweetness by adding a pinch of mineral salts to sweeteners, which helps them quickly travel through the thick mucus of the tongue, resulting in a vastly improved experience of sweetness. “It works with stevia, but also aspartame, sucralose, monk fruit—it works very well with everything we’ve tried,” Dubois said, noting that it would probably also work with brazzein. With the right technology, sweeteners, he said, can become “remarkably sugarlike.”Yet searching for the perfect sugar alternative is a fool’s errand. No matter how good they get, a single substance is unlikely to satisfy all tastes and expectations about health. As my colleague Amanda Mull wrote when aspartame was deemed carcinogenic over the summer, there’s always something. Much is left to be learned about the health effects of natural sweeteners, which may not be as natural as they seem; some stevia products, for example, are chemically modified to taste better, Walters told meMore than anything, sweeteners exist so that people can indulge in sweet treats without needing to worry about the consequences. They can address most of sugar’s problems—but they can’t do everything. “If you pick one sweetener and put it in everything, and drink and eat it all day long, that’s probably not a good thing for you,” Walters said. A sugar-free, flawlessly sweet chocolate may someday come to exist, but I’ll probably never be able to gorge on it without dreading my next blood test.

Bad Bunny’s Songs of Exile

6 h

theatlantic.com

Near the end of Bad Bunny’s 2022 World’s Hottest Tour in Las Vegas, all the lights went out. The Puerto Rican singer and rapper filled the darkness before the song “El Apagón” with a six-minute speech in Spanish about what makes his home island bien cabrón—“really fucking awesome.” He highlighted not only Puerto Rico’s beauty but also its resilience in the face of immense challenges: corrupt governance, poor electricity and water access, a hurricane only five years after the devastation of Hurricane María. Although “it is always becoming harder for Puerto Ricans to live on the island,” he said, their strong sense of kinship saves them: “The leaders are the people, who always help one another.”His speech soon turned into a lament twinged with guilt. “Sometimes I see comments that are like, ‘Where is Bad Bunny?’” he told the stadium. “I’m here, in Las Vegas. This is my job.” The price of fame, he went on to suggest, was a type of exile—work that he cherished but that kept him from the island and people he loved.Community has long been central to Bad Bunny’s work. The Latin-trap superstar, who has set Spotify streaming records and repeatedly topped the Billboard 200 chart, seldom introduces himself without mentioning where he comes from (accepting the 2022 Video Music Awards Artist of the Year trophy, he declared, “I’m Benito Antonio Martínez, from Puerto Rico to the world!”). He famously resists singing or giving interviews in English. Many of his songs contribute to a long Caribbean musical tradition of rebellion against colonialism. Meanwhile, others form an archive of place; the mountains, rivers, and beaches of Puerto Rico seep into numerous perreo anthems. “This is my beach / This is my sun / This is my land / This is me,” ends the house track “El Apagón,” signaling an understanding of Caribbean people as inextricable from the islands themselves. Bad Bunny’s latest tour and album, however, mark a spiritual departure for the artist, finding him retreating inward to wrestle with cynicism and isolation at the top of the world.[Read: SNL didn’t need subtitles]The ongoing Most Wanted Tour, which began in late February, is less of a communal celebration and more of a solo rodeo. I don’t mean this only metaphorically: Midway through the Barclays Center concert I attended this month in Brooklyn, Bad Bunny appeared onstage atop a real, live horse. In the lead-up to this entrance, the stadium darkened as a three-minute video played on-screen, revealing a desert landscape of desolate sepia tones. “They tell me Jesus was in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights,” the singer growled in Spanish. “I’ve lost count of the years I’ve spent between sand and cactus.” In the video, a masked Bad Bunny, encased in a buckskin jacket, rode a slow-trotting horse into an apocalyptic sunset. “I remain like this,” Bad Bunny said. “Alone.” (At this point, my friend’s 78-year-old Puerto Rican grandmother, whom I attended the concert with, cried out in concern: “We’re here for you, baby!”)This new lonely-cowboy persona is in line with the artist’s most recent album, Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana, the 22-song trap opera behind this tour. In it, Bad Bunny explores what it means to be the caballo ganadór, or winning horse—at least that’s what he calls himself in the opening track, “Nadie Sabe,” an orchestral rap that samples trampling hooves. In 2022, he was, by several measures, the top artist in the world. Yet he doesn’t seem convinced that the hype is worth the stress. “Everyone wants to be No. 1,” he raps. “If you want it I’ll give it to you, motherfucker.” What fun is being No. 1 when no one can share it with you?From the get-go, the new tour has approached listeners from a more standoffish posture. “If you’re not a real fan, don’t come,” read the official ads. Instead of energetic house warming up the audience as happened in 2022, this year’s show opened with the longing strings of a classical orchestra. (My friend’s grandmother: “They’re putting me to sleep!”) The ensemble’s rendition of Charles Aznavour’s French ballad “Hier Encore”—which Bad Bunny’s “Monaco” samples—set an early tone for the evening of nostalgia, as if happier days existed largely in the past.Visually, the Most Wanted Tour was also decidedly placeless, leaning into minimalism and abstraction. At the World’s Hottest Tour show I attended in Las Vegas, the vibe was “beach party”: Bad Bunny appeared in an array of joyful pastels. Dancers in bikinis and denim shorts freestyled under string lights. Visuals showed cartoon dolphins swimming toward island oases. I remember feeling shocked when I left the stadium and stepped into the Mojave Desert’s hot and twisting air. The concert had felt like a portal home to the Dominican Republic, ready to rival JetBlue. I could almost feel the cool shine of the sea melting over my feet.Yet this time around, tropical maximalism was replaced by nondescript, arid visuals and monochrome Yeezy-style fashions. The dancers, dressed in all-black hoodies or chaps, appeared sparingly. Most often, Bad Bunny was onstage by himself, hopping from one end to another while performing trap bops in burgundy cowboy gear.For much of the performance, he also sported a Spider-Man-style mask or a studded nun’s habit (à la the Virgin Mary)—a tongue-in-cheek choice for a singer frequently criticized for his lewd lyrics. His hidden face added a layer of distance between him and the audience, seemingly signaling how much access to him we should really get to have. Bad Bunny has rebuked the parasocial aspects of fame, including people’s entitlement to his personal space. Throughout the Nadie Sabe album, he makes several references to a much-reported instance in which, during a vacation in the Dominican Republic, he threw a fan’s phone into some bushes after she photographed him without his consent.Yet despite the lingering specter of celebrity’s dark side, the show’s final act still managed to conjure a wider sense of connection within the audience. Bad Bunny ended with a slew of his reggaeton hits, old and new, and segued into his song “Tití Me Preguntó” with a roll call of places—asking where, among other groups, his Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans were at. With each mention, the stadium erupted into ecstatic screams of recognition. Flags rippled; decibels flared. The rare roar of a crowd of Dominicans, all in one place in the U.S., immediately brought tears to my eyes. Once the song started, we screamed back his lyrics about bringing a roster of girlfriends to his VIP table. We in the audience were there, together. Meanwhile, Bad Bunny looped the stage, alone again.

When the End of Humanity Isn’t the End of the World

6 h

theatlantic.com

During the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, when many countries were enacting variations of lockdown protocols, air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions decreased drastically. A meme began to spread across social media proclaiming that, with so many people spending most of their time at home, nature was healing. Images of clear canals, clean skies, and wild animals roaming empty city streets were accompanied by the phrase “We are the virus.” The memes quickly turned silly, and their core claims were roundly debunked as overly simplistic, plain wrong, and somewhat eugenicist. Beyond all this, the trend was deeply ironic: By diagnosing themselves as a pox upon the Earth, people were revealing their degree of self-obsession—a belief that humanity is so powerful and important that the briefest pause in our normal activities would have meaningful consequences for the planet.Nearly two centuries ago, the English author Mary Shelley confronted human beings’ instinctive anthropocentrism in her 1826 novel, The Last Man, which was published eight years after Frankenstein and has recently been reissued. Even then, Shelley might already have been thinking about humanity’s impact on Earth: As the scholar John Havard writes in his introduction to this new edition of the novel, at the time of her writing, “England was already responsible for most of the world’s carbon emissions. The wheels were in motion for the kind of Promethean unleashing of fire that created today’s climate change.”The Last Man is narrated by an Englishman named Lionel Verney, and takes place from 2073 to 2100, during which time he witnesses the beginning, middle, and end of a pandemic so deadly it appears to kill every single human on Earth except for him. Shelley’s wasn’t the first literary work to explore the notion of a lone survivor of an apocalypse; she was preceded even in her own century by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s novel, Le Dernier Homme, as well as by poems by Lord Byron and Thomas Campbell. But rather than viewing the end of mankind as the end of the world, Shelley examines the extinction of humanity on an Earth that keeps on living.[Read: Frankenstein reflects the hopes and fears of every scientific era]Shelley’s novel is preoccupied with how unnecessary human beings are to the planet’s continued revolution around the sun—its changing seasons, the survival of its other inhabitants. As the plague wipes out large swathes of the population, Verney mourns the loss of human relationships and creativity, but also recognizes that nature is full of its own unique bonds, rhythms, and beauty. Ultimately, The Last Man seems to celebrate the notion of life itself as worthy, whatever form it takes. Of course, we should attempt to reverse the damage we’ve wrought on the planet. But it might also behoove us to practice humility in the face of nature’s awesome forces.Shelley’s narrator has a unique relationship to the nonhuman world. His parents died when he was a child, and he was raised as a shepherd in service to a farmer in Cumberland. There, he grew up wild, “rough as the elements, and unlearned as the animals [he] tended.”Verney’s life changes suddenly as a teenager, when the English king’s son, Adrian, visits Cumberland. Verney’s late father had been friends with the king, and recognizing their shared history, Adrian lifts Verney up into the rarified world of the peerage. He invites the boy to live and travel alongside him, and under Adrian’s tutelage and with his resources, Verney studies poetry, philosophy, and science. Yet Shelley makes clear that Verney had never been ignorant: Having spent much of his youth laboring outdoors, he was deeply knowledgeable about “the panorama of nature, the change of seasons, and the various appearances of heaven and earth.” Given the years Shelley spent among some of the foremost Romanticists, including her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their close friend Lord Byron, it isn’t surprising that her protagonist finds, in the natural world, plenty to enrich the mind and spark curiosity.Part one of the novel is primarily concerned with conveying the richness of Verney’s social and political life, which is to say, the importance of his human relationships. But Verney’s narration also makes heavy use of natural metaphors and lengthy descriptions of landscapes; in one scene, for instance, he describes the love of his life, Idris, as a “star, set in single splendour in the dim anadem of balmy evening.” Shelley seems keen on demonstrating that despite the comfortable life of the mind Verney now lives, he never loses his reverence for nature.In the novel’s second part, the plague—an airborne virus with no clear pattern of contagion—makes its first appearance amid a Greek war of independencefrom the Ottoman empire. Beginning in Asia and spreading globally, the plague ends up turning the tide of the war as the residents of a besieged Constantinople fall ill and die quickly. One of the novel’s major characters, Lord Raymond, who is married to Verney’s sister, had traveled to the empire’s capital to join the war effort on the side of the Greeks; Verney and his cohort, including his sister, his wife, and Adrian, accompanied him there. Soon after, the plague strikes, and Verney and his circle retreat back to England, where they believe they will be safe from the disease. Before long, though, the plague arrives on England’s shores, ravaging the population.[Read: A pandemic novel that’s oddly soothing]Verney’s contingent survives the worst of the plague and soon leaves England in search of a climate less friendly to the disease. When they arrive in France, they find that their fellow survivors have broken into groups, including one whose extremist religious leader insists that humanity’s sinfulness is to blame for the plague’s spread. This section includes some of the novel’s most rapturous meditations on the natural world’s continued survival amid mass human death. Verney wanders among winter-stricken towns in whose buildings both wild and once-domesticated animals find shelter; watches as nature presents “her most unrivalled beauties” in lakes and mountains and enormous vistas; and, “carried away by wonder,” forgets about “the death of man.” As more and more humans disappear from the Earth, Verney and his companions are left to find solace in the planet’s ongoing cycles and the life that still inhabits it.By the end of the novel, Verney’s entire family and his closest friends have perished. Somewhat bitterly, he watches the thriving flora and fauna around him. But instead of cursing nature’s survival even as his species is going extinct, he recognizes the similarity between himself and the nonhuman animals who keep living: “I am not much unlike to you,” he proclaims. “Nerves, pulse, brain, joint, and flesh, of such am I composed, and ye are organized by the same laws.” Even the last man, as he believes himself to be, cannot begrudge the continued turning of the Earth and the flourishing of its creatures. The Last Man is only one radical guess at a potential future, but in it Shelley reminds her readers that humans need Earth far more than Earth needs us.

Is India an Autocracy?

6 h

theatlantic.com

Last October, Indian authorities revived legal proceedings against the novelist and activist Arundhati Roy. In a case first registered against her in 2010, Roy stood accused of “provocative speech” that aroused “enmity between different groups” for having said that Kashmir was not an “integral” part of India. The charge carries a maximum sentence of seven years and kept her from traveling to Germany to deliver the opening address at the 2023 Munich Literature Festival.The assault on expression, and on virtually every other mainstay of democracy, has become commonplace under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, and it is the backdrop against which Indians have begun voting to elect their next Parliament and prime minister. Of the nearly 1 billion eligible voters, perhaps more than 600 million will cast their votes over a six-week-long process. Modi, who heads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is widely expected to win a third term as prime minister in his bitter contest against a motley alliance of opposition parties, the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance (INDIA).[Read: What has happened to the rule of law in India?]The spectacle of hundreds of millions of Indians—many suffering severe material deprivation—performing their civic duty arouses both hope and wonder, often winning India the title of “world’s largest democracy.” But Indian democracy did not just begin to degrade under Modi: It has been eroding since the first years of independence. Modi has put that process on steroids and today presides over an autocracy in all but name.For decades, the Indian state has used coercive legal powers to suppress dissent and constitutional mechanisms to delegitimize votes. The judiciary has largely acquiesced, money has gushed into Indian politics, and Hindu nationalism has cast a dark shadow of division. What are treated now as anomalies have been the trajectory all along.Nonetheless, world leaders, including President Joe Biden, often describe India as a vibrant democracy. Even more nuanced analyses hold that Indian democracy will withstand the current crisis because Indians respect diversity and pluralism, the country’s democratic institutions are strong, and recovery is inevitable.This romantic view of an inherently democratic India is a fairy tale. According to the Swedish think tank V-Dem, India was never a liberal democracy, and today it is sliding ever more decisively toward autocracy. Even under its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s impressive electoral apparatus did not guarantee equality before the law or ensure essential liberties to citizens. Subsequent leaders, rather than plugging the cracks in India’s constitutional foundation, expanded them, not least by using the state’s coercive power to circumvent democratic processes for personal or partisan advantage. Fraying democratic norms rendered free speech, dissent, and judicial independence casualties from the start.The constitution that independent India adopted in 1950 defined the country as a democratic republic committed to justice, equality, and fraternity for its people. But the democratic conception of the state suffered its first blow when the constitution was just 18 months old. Nehru, frustrated that Indian courts were upholding the free-speech rights of his critics, amended the constitution in June 1951 to make seditious speech a punishable offense. Only one person was actually convicted of sedition before Nehru’s prime ministership ended with his death. But several suffered for extended periods after lower courts found them guilty and before higher ones reversed the verdicts. That long legal limbo had a chilling effect on speech.The Indian constitution had other undemocratic features that Nehru deployed. It evinced a preoccupation with integrity and security, and emphasized the union, rather than autonomy, of the states it federated. If India’s central government deemed a state’s politics to be dysfunctional, it could place the state under a kind of federal receivership called President’s Rule, essentially disenfranchising the state’s electorate. Nehru imposed President’s Rule eight times during his tenure. The constitution had other significant gaps: It didn’t furnish social and economic equality to women, for example. Nehru tried to pass a bill that would override traditional Hindu patrimonial practices, but even in the postindependence glow of national unity, organized Hindu forces asserted their identity and political power. They stymied Nehru’s legislative efforts in 1951 and then the implementation of the laws that did pass later.Nehru, for all his faults, valued tolerance and fairness. The same could scarcely be said of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who followed soon after as prime minister and initiated a steep decline from such democratic norms as existed under Nehru. In 1967, she responded to a peasant protest in Naxalbari, West Bengal, by passing the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which allowed the police to arrest and hold people without trial, bail, or explanation. This legislation would become an instrument of repression for decades to come. She also placed West Bengal under President’s Rule, and her chosen governor used the police and armed forces to wipe out a generation of idealistic students who supported the peasants. In fact, Gandhi imposed President’s Rule nearly 30 times from 1966 to 1975, when she declared an internal emergency and assumed dictatorial powers. Gandhi called for elections in early 1977, hoping to legitimize her autocratic rule. But when a frustrated Indian populace threw her out, the University of Chicago political scientists Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph—echoing a commonly held view—happily concluded, “Democracy has acquired a mass base in India.”[From the April 1940 issue: India’s demand and England’s answer]That proved wishful thinking. Upon reelection as prime minister in 1980, Gandhi accelerated the erosion of democratic norms. She imposed President’s Rule more than a dozen times in her second stint in power, from 1980 to 1984. She also began pandering to the sentiments of Hindus to win their votes, opening the door to the hard-line Hindu-nationalists who have since become an overpowering force in Indian politics.Perhaps Gandhi’s most pernicious legacy was the injection of “black” money—unaccounted-for funds, accumulated through tax evasion and illegal market operations—into Indian politics. In 1969, she banned corporate donations to political parties. Soon after, her campaigns became extremely expensive, ushering in an era of “briefcase politics,” in which campaign donations came in briefcases full of cash, mostly filling the coffers of her own Congress Party. Criminals became election financiers, and as big-money (and black-money) politics spread, ideology and public interest gave way to politics for private gain. Legislators in state assemblies frequently “defected,” crossing party lines to bag ministerial positions that generated corrupt earnings.And yet, for all the damage done to it, many analysts and diplomats still cleaved to the romantic view of Indian democracy. Upon Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, a former U.S. foreign-service officer, writing in Foreign Affairs, described the monarchical-style handover of power to her son, the political neophyte Rajiv, as proof of the “strength of the republic and its democratic constitutional system.”Rajiv’s stewardship could rightly be seen in an entirely different light. He was the prime minister who let the gale force of Hindu nationalism blast through the door his mother had opened. He commissioned for the state-owned television network, Doordarshan, the much-loved Ramayana epic, which spawned a Rambo-like iconography of Lord Ram as Hindutva’s avenger. And he reignited a contest between Hindus and Muslims over the site of a 16th-century mosque called the Babri Masjid, which had been sealed since 1949 to contain communal passions. Hindu zealots claimed that the structure was built on Lord Ram’s birthplace, and Rajiv opened its gates. Then, in December 1992, Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao’s Congress Party–led government dithered as frenzied Hindu mobs demolished Babri Masjid, triggering bloody riots and further advancing the Hindu-nationalist cause.The decade from 1989 to 1998 saw a series of coalition governments govern India—a development that the historian Ramachandra Guha has described as “a manifestation of the widening and deepening of democracy” because “different regions and different groups had acquired a greater stake in the system.” Democratic norms were, in fact, degrading at a quickening pace during this period. Big-money politics had bred mercenary politicians, who at the unseemly edge were gangsters providing caste representation, protection, and other services that the state could not supply. Politicians paid little attention to the public good—such as creating more jobs and improving education and health services, especially in the eastern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—and learned that they could use plausible corruption charges against one another as a weapon.Hindu nationalism swelled. From 1998 to 2003, the BJP led a coalition government that began aligning school textbooks with a Hindu-nationalist agenda. A Congress-led government from 2004 to 2014 arrested this trend but presided over a steep descent into corruption: During that decade, the share of members of the lower house of Parliament charged with serious crimes—including murder, extortion, and kidnapping—reached 21 percent, up from 12 percent.[Read: India’s democracy is the world’s problem]Both the BJP and the Congress Party embraced a model of economic growth driven by the very rich, and both dismissed the injury to the economic interests of the weak and vulnerable, as well as to the environment, as necessary collateral damage. In Chhattisgarh, a Congress Party leader, with the support of the state’s BJP government, sponsored a private vigilante army to protect business interests, which included the exploitation of minerals and the mowing down of pristine forests in the tribal areas. When the supreme court declared the private vigilante army unconstitutional, Indian authorities responded in the manner of Andrew Jackson, who famously waved off the United States’ chief justice with the statement, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”The anti-terrorism and anti-sedition provisions that earlier governments had supplied came in handy when the Congress-led coalition sought to suppress protests and intimidate opponents. The government also introduced and steadily widened the ambit of a new law, ostensibly for the prevention of money laundering, and it used the investigative powers of the state to its own benefit in whitewashing corruption: In 2013, a justice of the supreme court described the Central Bureau of Investigation as a “caged parrot” singing in “its master’s voice.”India, on the eve of the election that brought Modi to power in May 2014, could thus hardly be described as a robust democracy. Rather, all the instruments for its demolition had already been assembled and politely passed along from one government to the next. In the hands of a populist demagogue such as Modi, the demolition instruments proved to be a wrecking ball.As a candidate, Modi promised to right India’s feckless economic policy and countervail against the Congress Party’s corruption. These claims were not credible. Worse, as chief minister of Gujarat in 2002, Modi had failed to stop a bloody massacre of Muslims, thereby establishing himself as an avatar of Hindu-nationalist extremism. He couldn’t even get a visa to enter the United States.Nonetheless, many of India’s public intellectuals were sanguine. Antidemocratic forces could be no match for the pluralistic disposition of India’s people and the liberal institutions of its state, some insisted. The political scientist Ashutosh Varshney noted that Modi had eschewed anti-Muslim rhetoric in his campaign—because, Varshney inferred, Indian politics abhorred ideological extremism. Another political scientist, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, asked the BJP’s political opponents to reflect on their own fascist tendencies. The Congress Party, Mehta wrote, “had done its best” to instill fear in citizens and corrode the institutions that protected individual rights; Modi would pull India out of the economic stagnation that Congress had induced.Anti-Muslim violence spread quickly after Modi came to power. Prominent critics of Hindu nationalism were gunned down on their doorsteps: M. M. Kalburgi in Dharwad, Karnataka, in August 2015, and Gauri Lankesh in Bangalore in July 2017. And India was tumbling in global indicators of democracy. V-Dem has classified India as an electoral autocracy since 2018: The country conducts elections but suppresses individual rights, dissent, and the media so egregiously that it can no longer be considered a democracy in any sense of the word. Even the word “electoral,” though, in V-Dem’s designation, has become dubious since then.[Samanth Subramanian: Indian democracy is fighting back]Under Modi’s rule, India has taken a sharp turn toward autocracy, but to get there, the BJP had only to drive a truck through the fissures in the state’s democratic foundations that earlier governments had already widened. The government has seized the coercive powers of the state to fearsome ends, arresting activists and human-rights defenders under various provisions of the law. Successive Washington Post investigations have concluded that at least some of these arrests were based on planted evidence. One of those arrested, a Jesuit priest and human-rights activist, died in prison for want of medical attention when suffering from complications of COVID-19. Income and wealth inequalities have grown, in tandem with extraordinary expenditures even in state election campaigns. Demands for the demolition of more mosques have mounted. Inevitably, to woo Hindu voters, even opposition parties, including the Congress Party, have adopted a softer version of Hindu-nationalist ideology.The BJP government regularly brings charges against its critics in the media for tax lapses or anti-nationalism, among other pretexts. Reporters Without Borders describes India as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists. In 2023, it ranked India 161 out of 180 countries in press freedom, citing the takeover of media outlets by oligarchs close to Modi and the “horrific” online harassment by Modi’s “army of online supporters.”Can Indians really be said to vote freely under such circumstances? Even if the answer is yes, the government seems to have found the means to disenfranchise citizens after the fact. In August 2019, the government withdrew the constitutional provision that gave Kashmir special autonomy. It also downgraded Kashmir from a state to a territory, placing it under the direct control of the central government without consulting the people of Kashmir. Because the supreme court has refused to reverse this move, future central governments might similarly downgrade other states.The chief ministers of Uttarakhand and Delhi are both in jail, awaiting trial on money-laundering charges, and the government has frozen the bank accounts of the Congress Party on allegations of tax evasion. Many opposition-party members who face criminal charges join the BJP, effectively giving the ruling party greater political power in exchange for the dismissal of the charges against them. A recent supreme-court directive requiring transparency in a segment of campaign financing revealed signs of extensive corruption primarily benefitting BJP politicians but also opposition leaders in charge of state governments.Nevertheless, after Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the United States last June and his address to a joint session of the Congress, the White House’s joint U.S.-India statement read: “The United States and India reaffirm and embrace their shared values of freedom, democracy, human rights, inclusion, pluralism, and equal opportunities for all citizens.” In January, Secretary of State Antony Blinken referred to India as the “world’s largest democracy” and a vital partner, a position that the State Department continues to hold.Such statements are at odds with the Indian reality. Over the seven decades since independence, Indian democracy has betrayed its people, leaving the majority without dignified jobs, foundational education, public health, or clean air and water. Alongside that betrayal, the death by a thousand cuts of democratic norms raises the troubling question: Is India now an autocracy?If Modi wins this election, his victory will surely strengthen autocratic tendencies in India. But in the unlikely event that he loses, the erosion of democracy will merely have paused. Democracy is a fragile construct. When deviation from democratic norms persists for as long as it has in Indian politics, deviance becomes the norm. Reversing it becomes a monumental task. Especially if a winning opposition coalition fails to improve the quality of Indian lives, an electorally resurgent Modi and his Hindutva supporters could potentially seal democracy’s fate.

The Happiness Trinity

Why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?

7 h

theatlantic.com

No One Has a Right to Protest in My Home

The difference between a private yard and a public forum

7 h

theatlantic.com

Photos of the Week: Wheelbarrow Race, Count Binface, Orange Skies

A volcanic eruption in Indonesia, a tilting tower in Taiwan, a growing refugee camp in Chad, the Tokyo Rainbow Pride Parade in Japan, humanitarian aid parachuted into Gaza, protests opposing Israel’s attacks on Gaza in the United States, a performance by Phish at the Sphere in Las Vegas, and much more

7 h

theatlantic.com

Trump Is Getting What He Wants

The Supreme Court seems to be endorsing his views on presidential power.

18 h

theatlantic.com

How America Lost Sleep

Many Americans are reporting that they’d feel better if they slept more, but finding the right remedy isn’t always simple.

19 h

theatlantic.com

The Passover Plot

The dark legacy and ongoing body count of an ancient anti-Semitic myth

23 h

theatlantic.com

The Supreme Court Is Frighteningly Warm to Trump’s Immunity Argument

At this morning’s oral argument, the justices debated the ins and outs of a dangerous idea.

23 h

theatlantic.com

The Rise of Big Vet

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theatlantic.com

In the pandemic winter of 2020, Katie, my family’s 14-year-old miniature poodle, began coughing uncontrollably. After multiple vet visits, and more than $1,000 in bills, a veterinary cardiologist diagnosed her with heart failure. Our girl, a dog I loved so much that I wrote an essay about how I called her my “daughter,” would likely die within nine months.Katie survived for almost two years. My younger son joked that Katie wasn’t going to let advanced heart failure get in the way of her life goal of never leaving my side, but the truth was that I was the one who wouldn’t let her go. Katie’s extended life didn’t come cheap. There were repeated scans, echocardiograms, and blood work, and several trips to veterinary emergency rooms. One drug alone cost $300 a month, and that was after I shopped aggressively for discounts online.People like me have fueled the growth of what you might call Big Vet. As household pets have risen in status—from mere animals to bona fide family members—so, too, has owners’ willingness to spend money to ensure their well-being. Big-money investors have noticed. According to data provided to me by PitchBook, private equity poured $51.6 billion into the veterinary sector from 2017 to 2023, and another $9.3 billion in the first four months of this year, seemingly convinced that it had discovered a foolproof investment. Industry cheerleaders pointed to surveys showing that people would go into debt to keep their four-legged friends healthy. The field was viewed as “low-risk, high-reward,” as a 2022 report issued by Capstone Partners put it, singling out the industry for its higher-than-average rate of return on investment.[From the December 2022 issue: How much would you pay to save your pet’s life?]In the United States, corporations and private-equity funds have been rolling up smaller chains and previously independent practices. Mars Inc., of Skittles and Snickers fame, is, oddly, the largest owner of stand-alone veterinary clinics in the United States, operating more than 2,000 practices under the names Banfield, VCA, and BluePearl. JAB Holding Company, the owner of National Veterinary Associates’ 1,000-plus hospitals (not to mention Panera and Espresso House), also holds multiple pet-insurance lines in its portfolio. Shore Capital Partners, which owns several human health-care companies, controls Mission Veterinary Partners and Southern Veterinary Partners.As a result, your local vet may well be directed by a multinational shop that views caring for your fur baby as a healthy component of a diversified revenue stream. Veterinary-industry insiders now estimate that 25 to 30 percent of practices in the United States are under large corporate umbrellas, up from 8 percent a little more than a decade ago. For specialty clinics, the number is closer to three out of four. And as this happened, veterinary prices began to rise—a lot. Americans spent an estimated $38 billion on health care and related services for companion animals in 2023, up from about $29 billion in 2019. Even as overall inflation got back under control last year, the cost of veterinary care did not. In March 2024, the Consumer Price Index for urban consumers was up 3.5 percent year over year. The veterinary-services category was up 9.6 percent. If you have ever wondered why keeping your pet healthy has gotten so out-of-control expensive, Big Vet just might be your answer.To get a sense of what might happen when the profit-seeking dial gets turned up too high in veterinary medicine, we need look no further than human health care. An extensive body of research shows that when private equity takes over a hospital or physician practice, prices and the number of expensive procedures tend to go up. A study found serious medical errors occur more frequently after private equity buys the hospital. Another study found that costs to patients rise, too, sometimes substantially. And that’s in a tougher regulatory environment. In veterinary medicine, there is no giant entity like Medicare capable of pushing back on prices. There is no requirement, in fact, to provide care at all, no matter how dire the animal’s condition. Payment is due at the time of service or there is no service. Whenever I told people I was working on this article, I was inundated with Big Vet complaints. Catherine Liu, a professor at UC Irvine, took her elderly pit-bull mix, Buster, to a local VCA when he became lethargic and began drooling excessively. More than $8,000 in charges later, there was still no diagnosis. “Sonograms, endoscopy—what about just a hypothesis of what the symptoms could be? Nothing like that at all was forthcoming,” Liu told me. Shortly before Buster died, a vet in private practice diagnosed him with cancer. The disease, Liu said, had not once been mentioned by the vets at VCA. (Mars Petcare, VCA’s parent company, declined to comment on the episode.)I don’t mean to single out VCA here—in fact, I should note that a VCA vet’s medical protocol was almost certainly responsible for my dog’s longer-than-expected life. One reason Mars-owned chains attract outsized attention for their high costs and customer-service failures is that the company actually brands its acquisitions. That’s unusual. A study conducted by the Arizona consumer advocate Todd Nemet found that fewer than 15 percent of corporate-owned practices in the state slap their own brand identity on their vets; most keep the original practice name, leaving customers with the illusion of local ownership. (When I asked Thrive Pet Healthcare, a chain majority-owned by TSG Consumer Partners, about why the company doesn’t brand its clinics, a spokesperson replied, “We realize the value of local hospital brands and are committed to preserving and supporting them.”) Indeed, some pet owners told me that they realized that ownership of their vet had changed only after what they thought was a routine visit resulted in recommendations for mounds of tests, which turned out to have shot up in price. Paul Cerro, the CEO of Cedar Grove Capital, which invests in the pet industry, says this issue is frequent in online reviews. “People will say, ‘I’ve been coming here for four years, and all of a sudden I’m getting charged for things I’ve never been charged for,’ and they give it one star.”[Read: The great veterinary shortage]Big Vet denies charging excessive prices. VCA Canada, for instance, recently told The Globe and Mail that prices can increase after an acquisition because “the quality of the care, the quality of everything we offer to them, goes up as well.” A spokesperson for Mars told me, “We invest heavily in our associates, hospitals, state-of-the-art equipment, technology, and other resources.” NVA, which is planning an initial public offering in 2025 or 2026, did not directly answer a question about why veterinary prices were rising so rapidly, instead sending me a statement saying, in part, “Our vision is to build a community of hospitals that pet owners trust, are easy to access, and provide the best possible value for care.” Do rising prices really just reflect higher-quality care? There may be some truth to this, but there is also evidence to the contrary. A study published last year in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, for example, found that vets working for large corporations reported more pressure to generate revenue, whereas veterinarians working for independent practices reported higher levels of satisfaction for such things as the “ability to acquire new large equipment” and the “ability to get new/different drugs.” Preliminary research by Emma Harris, the vice president of Vetster, a veterinary telehealth start-up, found significant differences in pricing between corporate and privately owned veterinary clinics in the same geographic region. Usually, she told me, the increases “occurred immediately after the sale to a private-equity-owned group.”All of this doesn’t sit well with many in the sector. Vets tend to be idealistic, which makes sense given that many of them rack up six figures in student-loan debt to pursue a profession that pays significantly less than human medicine. One vet, who worked for an emergency-services practice that, they said, raised prices by 20 percent in 2022, told me, “I almost got to the point where I was ashamed to tell people what the estimate was for things because it was so insanely high.” (The vet asked for anonymity because they feared legal repercussions.) Others described mounting pressure to upsell customers following acquisition by private equity. “You don’t always need to take X-rays on an animal that’s vomited just one time,” Kathy Lewis, a veterinarian who formerly worked at a Tennessee practice purchased in 2021 by Mission Veterinary Partners, told me. “But there was more of that going on.” Prices increased rapidly as well, she said, leading to customer complaints. (Mission Veterinary Partners did not respond to requests for comment.)The combination of wheeling-and-dealing and price increases in the veterinary sector is beginning to attract the government’s attention. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission required, in 2022 consent decree, that JAB seek prior approval before purchasing any emergency or specialty clinic within 25 miles of one it already owns in California and Texas for the next decade. In her written comments, FTC Chair Lina Khan said she feared these one-by-one purchases could lead to the development of a stealth monopoly. (JAB denied any wrongdoing.) And in the United Kingdom, where corporate ownership is higher than in the United States (even the practice originally owned by the author of the classic veterinary novel All Creatures Great and Small has been rolled up), government authorities are moving forward with an investigation into high prices and market concentration after an initial inquiry drew what regulators called an “unprecedented” response from the public.Pet owners used to have an easier time accepting the short lives of domestic animals. Few people were taking the barnyard cat or junkyard dog in for chemotherapy or ACL surgery, to say nothing of post-op aquatic physical therapy. “When we started out over 20 years ago, you had to live near a veterinary teaching hospital to have access to something like an MRI,” Karen Leslie, the executive director of the Pet Fund, a charity that aids people with vet bills, told me. “Now it’s the standard of care. It’s available basically everywhere—but that starts at $2,000.”Big Vet, in Leslie’s view, helped fuel an increase in expensive services. The same medical progress that’s helped humans beat back once-fatal diseases is doing the same for cats and dogs, extending their life spans to record lengths. But only if you have the money to pay for it. Some pets—my late Katie, Liu’s late Buster—receive one expensive test or treatment after another, sometimes helpful, sometimes not. Other equally loved pets may go without basic care altogether, or even fall victim to what the industry calls “economic euthanasia,” where they are put down because their owners can’t afford their medical bills. (Pet insurance, widely promoted by the industry, is unlikely to help much. Uptake rates are in the low single digits, a result of relatively high costs and often-limited benefits.)[Watch: Volunteer veterinarians in Ukraine]The American Veterinary Medical Association’s tracker shows that vet visits and purchases of heartworm and flea-and-tick medications are down compared with this month last year, even as practice revenues are up, suggesting that some owners are having trouble affording routine, preventative care. The market researcher Packaged Facts found that a full third of pet owners say that they would take their animal to the vet more often if it were less expensive. Shelter Animals Count, an animal-advocacy group, reports that the number of pets surrendered to shelters rose in the past two years. Carol Mithers, the author of the upcoming book Rethinking Rescue, told me that some people give up pets because they believe the shelter system will provide them with necessary medical treatment—something that is, heartbreakingly, not true.The veterinary past is easy to romanticize. The truth is that pets have never received all the needed care, and that wealthy pet owners have always had access to more care. But the emergence of Big Vet and the injection of cutthroat incentives into a traditionally idealistic, local industry threatens to make these problems far worse. It portends a future in which some pet owners get shaken down, their love for their pets exploited financially, while others must forego even basic care for their pets. I don’t think Katie, who loved all animals, would approve. I certainly don’t.

How the Campus Left Broke Higher Education

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theatlantic.com

Fifty-six years ago this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university: stop funding military research, and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby Black neighborhood. After a week of futile negotiations, Columbia called in New York City police to clear the occupation.The physical details of that crisis were much rougher than anything happening today. The students barricaded doors and ransacked President Grayson Kirk’s office. “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up,” Mark Rudd, the student leader and future member of the terrorist Weather Underground, wrote in an open letter to Kirk, who resigned a few months later. The cops arrested more than 700 students and injured at least 100, while one of their own was permanently disabled by a student.In other ways, the current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s. Why can’t students imagine doing it some other way?Perhaps because the structure of protest reflects the nature of universities. They make good targets because of their abiding vulnerability: They can’t deal with coercion, including nonviolent disobedience. Either they overreact, giving the protesters a new cause and more allies (this happened in 1968, and again last week at Columbia), or they yield, giving the protesters a victory and inviting the next round of disruption. This is why Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, no matter what she does, finds herself hammered from the right by Republican politicians and from the left by her own faculty and students, unable to move without losing more ground. Her detractors know that they have her trapped by their willingness to make coercive demands: Do what we say or else we’ll destroy you and your university. They aren’t interested in a debate.[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance. At the heart of this spirit is free speech, which means more than just chanting, but free speech can’t thrive in an atmosphere of constant harassment. When one faction or another violates this spirit, the whole university is weakened as if stricken with an illness. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who tried and failed to mediate a peaceful end to the Columbia occupation, wrote afterward: In a community one cannot regain authority simply by asserting it, or by using force to suppress dissidents. Authority in this case is like respect. One can only earn the authority—the loyalty of one’s students—by going in and arguing with them, by engaging in full debate and, when the merits of proposed change are recognized, taking the necessary steps quickly enough to be convincing. The crackdown at Columbia in 1968 was so harsh that a backlash on the part of faculty and the public obliged the university to accept the students’ demands: a loss, then a win. The war in Vietnam ground on for years before it ended and history vindicated the protesters: another loss, another win. But the really important consequence of the 1968 revolt took decades to emerge. We’re seeing it now on Columbia’s quad and the campuses of elite universities around the country. The most lasting victory of the ’68ers was an intellectual one. The idea underlying their protests wasn’t just to stop the war or end injustice in America. Its aim was the university itself—the liberal university of the postwar years, which no longer exists.That university claimed a special role in democratic society. A few weeks after the 1968 takeover, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter gave the commencement address to a wounded institution. “A university is a community, but it is a community of a special kind,” Hofstadter said—“a community devoted to inquiry. It exists so that its members may inquire into truths of all sorts. Its presence marks our commitment to the idea that somewhere in society there must be an organization in which anything can be studied or questioned—not merely safe and established things but difficult and inflammatory things, the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” This mission rendered the community fragile, dependent on the self-restraint of its members.The lofty claims of the liberal university exposed it to charges of all kinds of hypocrisy, not least its entanglement with the American war machine. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who became a guru to the New Left, coined the phrase repressive tolerance for the veil that hid liberal society’s mechanisms of violence and injustice. In this scheme, no institution, including the university, remained neutral, and radical students embraced their status as an oppressed group.[Charles Sykes: The new rules of political journalism]At Stanford (where my father was an administrator in the late ’60s, and where students took over a campus building the week after the Columbia revolt), white students compared themselves to Black American slaves. To them, the university was not a community dedicated to independent inquiry but a nexus of competing interest groups where power, not ideas, ruled. They rejected the very possibility of a disinterested pursuit of truth. In an imaginary dialogue between a student and a professor, a member of the Stanford chapter of Students for a Democratic Society wrote: “Rights and privacy and these kinds of freedom are irrelevant—you old guys got to get it through your heads that to fight the whole corrupt System POWER is the only answer.”A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors–the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?”A Columbia student, writing to one of his professors in a letter that the student shared with me, explained the dynamic so sharply that it’s worth quoting him at length: I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept in to every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen. The muscle of independent thinking and open debate, the ability to earn authority that Daniel Bell described as essential to a university’s survival, has long since atrophied. So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.[Adam Serwer: The Republicans who want American carnage]And when the shrewd and unscrupulous Representative Elise Stefanik demanded of the presidents of Harvard and Penn whether calls for genocide violated their universities’ code of conduct, they had no good way to answer. If they said yes, they would have faced the obvious comeback: “Why has no one been punished?” So they said that it depended on the “context,” which was technically correct but sounded so hopelessly legalistic that it led to the loss of their jobs. The response also made nonsense of their careers as censors of unpopular speech. Shafik, of Columbia, having watched her colleagues’ debacle, told the congresswoman what she wanted to hear, then backed it up by calling the cops onto campus—only to find herself denounced on all sides, including by Senator Tom Cotton, who demanded that President Joe Biden deploy the United States military to Columbia, and by her own faculty senate, which threatened a vote of censure.The right always knows how to exploit the excesses of the left. It happened in 1968, when the campus takeovers and the street battles between anti-war activists and cops at the Democratic convention in Chicago helped elect Richard Nixon. Republican politicians are already exploiting the chaos on campuses. This summer, the Democrats will gather again in Chicago, and the activists are promising a big show. Donald Trump will be watching.Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.

Writing Is a Blood-and-Guts Business

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theatlantic.com

The scrolls lay inside glass cases. On one, the writing was jagged; on others, swirling or steady. I was at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, admiring centuries-old Chinese calligraphy that, the wall text told me, was meant to contain the life force—qi—of the calligrapher expressed through each brushstroke. Though I couldn’t read the language, I was moved to see the work of writers who lived hundreds of years ago, whose marks still seemed to say something about the creators long after they’d passed.I’m using my fingers to type this now, but every letter is perfectly legible and well spaced. Today, the human body behind the written word is less apparent. When I’m composing an email, Gmail makes suggestions I can deploy in one click: “Awesome!” “Sounds great!” “Yes, I can do that.” Artificial intelligence can produce instantaneous sentences. That a person is responsible for text is no longer a given.Last year, Alex Reisner reported in The Atlantic that more than 191,000 books had been absorbed into a data set called Books3, which was then used to train generative-AI large language models that may someday threaten to take the place of human writers. Among the books in question was my debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, which took me five years to complete. My new novel, Real Americans, took even longer: I began working on it in December 2016, and it’s being released at the end of April, seven years and four months later. Those numbers don’t even account for the years of reading, practice, and education (both formal and self-directed) that preceded the writing itself. Now ChatGPT and other LLMs, trained on a wide store of human-generated literature, stand on the cusp of writing novels in no time at all.[Read: What ChatGPT can’t teach my writing students]This seems, initially, discouraging. Here is an entity that can seemingly do what I do, but faster. At present, it “hallucinates” and gets basic facts wrong, but it may soon be able to generate text that can seamlessly imitate people. Unlike me, it won’t need sleep, or bathroom breaks, or patience, or life experience; it won’t get the flu. In fact, AI embodies hypotheticals I can just imagine for myself: If only I could write all day and night. If only I were smarter and more talented. If only I had endless knowledge. If only I could read whole libraries. What could I create if I had no needs? What might this development mean for writing?Considering limitlessness has led me to believe that the impediments of human writers are what lead us to create meaningful art. And they are various: limits of our body, limits of our perspectives, limits of our skills. But the constraints of an artist’s process are, in the language of software, a feature, not a bug.Writing is a blood-and-guts business, literally as well as figuratively. As I type with my hands, my lungs oxygenate the blood that my heart pumps; my brain sends and receives signals. Each of these functions results in the words on this page. In the Middle Ages, monks in the scriptoria wrote: “Two fingers hold the pen, but the whole body toils.” Typing this now, my upper back hurts. I am governed by pesky physical needs: I have to drink water and eat; my mind can’t focus indefinitely. My hands are too cold, and because I haven’t moved it, one foot is going numb. On other occasions, illnesses or injuries have affected my ability to write.The sensitivities of our fragile human bodies require that our labor takes time. Nothing is more discouraging when I am trying to complete a draft. But this exchange—my finite hours for this creative endeavor—imports meaning: It benefits the work, and makes it richer. Over weeks, months, and years, characters emerge and plots take surprising turns. A thought can be considered day after day and deepened.While revising my forthcoming book, one of my thighs erupted into a mysterious rash. Sparing gruesome details, let’s just say it disturbed and distracted me. But it also led me to a realization: I’d been approaching the creation of my novel as though it could be perfectible. In reducing my entire self to my cognition alone, akin to a computer, I’d forgotten the truth that I am inseparable from my imperfect body, with its afflictions and ailments. My books emerge from this body.In his book How to Write One Song, the musician Jeff Tweedy writes: “I aspire to make trees instead of tables.” He was talking about songs, but the concept was revelatory to me as a novelist. Unlike a table, the point of a novel isn’t to be useful or stable or uniform. Instead, it is as singular and particular as its creator, shaped by numerous forces and conditions. In spite of its limits and because of them, a tree is an exuberant organic expression. Though costumed in typeset words, a novel is an exuberant organic expression too.[Read: My books were used to train meta’s generative AI. Good.]AI is creating tables out of our trees. Its infinite iterations are pure veneer: bloodless and gutless, serviceable furniture made of the deforested expanse of human experience. A large language model doesn’t require experience, because it has consumed ours. It appears limitless in its perspective because it writes from an extensive data set of our own. Though writing comes out of these experiences and perspectives, it does not follow that unlimited quantities of each beget maximally substantial work. I believe that the opposite is true.Compared with AI, we might seem like pitiful creatures. Our lives will end; our memory is faulty; we can’t absorb 191,000 books; our frames of reference are circumscribed. One day, I will die. I foreclose on certain opportunities by pursuing others. Typing this now means I cannot fold my laundry or have lunch with a friend. Yet I believe writing is worth doing, and this sacrifice of time makes it consequential. When we write, we are picking and choosing—consciously or otherwise—what is most substantial to us. Behind human writing is a human being calling for attention and saying, Here is what is important to me. I’m able to move through only my one life, from my narrow point of view; this outlook creates and yet constrains my work. Good writing is born of mortality: the limits of our body and perspectives—the limits of our very lives.I can imagine a future in which ChatGPT works more convincingly than it does now. Would I exchange the hours that I spent working on each of my two books for finished documents spat out by ChatGPT? That would have saved me years of attempts and failures. But all of that frustration, difficult as it was in the moment, changed me. It wasn’t a job I clocked in and out of, contained within a tidy sum of hours. I carried the story with me while I showered, drove—even dreamed. My mind was changed by the writing, and the writing changed by my mind.[Read: Prepare for the textpocalypse]Working on a novel, I strain against my limits as a bounded, single body by imagining characters outside of myself. I test the limits of my skill when I wonder, Can I pull this off? And though it feels grandiose to say, writing is an attempt to use my short supply of hours to create a work that outlasts me. These exertions in the face of my constraints strike me as moving, and worthy, and beautiful.Writing itself is a technology, and it will shift with the introduction of new tools, as it always has. I’m not worried that AI novelists will replace human novelists. But I am afraid that we’ll lose sight of what makes human writing worthwhile: its efforts, its inquiries, its bids for connection—all bounded and shaped by its imperfections—and its attempts to say, This is what it’s like for me. Is it like this for you? If we forget what makes our human work valuable, we might forget what makes our human lives valuable too. Novels are one of the best means we have for really seeing one another, because behind each effort is a mortal person, expressing and transmuting their realities to the best of their ability. Reading and writing are vital means by which we bridge our separate consciousnesses. In understanding these limits, we can understand one another’s lives. At least, we can try.

The Inflation Plateau

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theatlantic.com

Just a few months ago, America seemed to have licked the post-pandemic inflation surge for good. Then, in January, prices rose faster than expected. Probably just a blip. The same thing happened in February. Strange, but likely not a big deal. Then March’s inflation report came in hot as well. Okay—is it time to panic?The short answer is no. Core inflation (the metric that policy makers pay close attention to because it excludes volatile prices such as food and energy) is stuck at about 4 percent, double the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. But that’s a long way from the crisis of 2022, when core inflation peaked at nearly 7 percent and the price of almost everything was going up dangerously fast. Instead, we seem to be facing a last-mile problem: Inflation has mostly normalized, but wringing out the final few percentage points in a handful of categories is proving harder than expected. There are two conflicting views of what exactly is going on, each with drastically different implications for how the Federal Reserve should respond. One camp worries that the Fed could lose control of inflation all over again; the other fears that the central bank will—whoops— unnecessarily bring the U.S. economy to its knees.The “vanishing inflation” view is that today’s still-rising prices reflect a combination of statistical quirks and pandemic ripple effects that will almost surely resolve on their own. This camp points out that basically all of the current excess inflation stems from auto insurance and housing. The auto-insurance story is straightforward: Car prices spiked in 2021 and 2022, and when cars get more expensive, so does insuring them. Car inflation yesterday leads to car-insurance inflation today. That’s frustrating for drivers right now, but it carries a silver lining. Given that car inflation has fallen dramatically over the past year, it should be only a matter of time before insurance prices stabilize as well.[Annie Lowrey: Inflation is your fault]Housing, which made up a full two-thirds of excess inflation in March, is a bit more complicated. You might think that housing inflation would be calculated simply by looking at the prices of new homes or apartments. But for the majority of Americans who already own their home, it is calculated using a measure known as “owners’ equivalent rent.” Government statisticians try to determine how much money homeowners would reasonably charge for rent by looking at what people in similar homes are paying. This way of calculating housing prices has all kinds of flaws. One issue is that inflation data are calculated monthly, but most renters have one- or two-year leases, which means the official numbers usually lag the real housing market by a year or more. The housing market has cooled off considerably in the past year and a half, but the inflation data are still reflecting the much-hotter market of early 2023 or late 2022. Sooner or later, they too should fall. “The excess inflation we have left is in a few esoteric areas that reflect past price increases,” Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at Yale’s Budget Lab, told me. “I’m not too worried about inflation taking off again.”The “hot wages” camp tells a very different story. Its members note that even as price increases appeared to be settling back down at the beginning of 2024, wages were still growing much faster than they did before the pandemic. When wages are rising quickly, many employers, especially those in labor-intensive service industries, raise prices to cover higher salary costs. That may show up in the data in different ways—maybe it’s groceries one month, maybe airfares or vehicle-repair costs another month—but the point is that as long as wages are hot, prices will be as well. “The increase in inflation over the last three months is higher than anything we saw from 1992 to 2019,” Jason Furman, the former director of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic advisers, told me. “It’s hard to say that’s just some fluke in the data.”Adherents of the “vanishing inflation” idea don’t deny the importance of wages in driving up prices; instead, they point to alternative measures that show wage growth closer to pre-pandemic levels. They also emphasize the fact that corporate profits are higher today than they were in 2019, implying that wages have more room to grow without necessarily pushing up prices.Although this dispute may sound technical, it will inform one of the most pivotal decisions the Federal Reserve has made in decades. Last year, the central bank raised interest rates to their highest levels since 2001, where they have remained even as inflation has fallen dramatically. Raising interest rates makes money more expensive for businesses and consumers to borrow and, thus, to spend, which is thought to reduce inflation but can also raise unemployment. This leaves the Fed with a tough choice to make: Should it keep rates high and risk suffocating the best labor market in decades, or begin cutting rates and risk inflation taking off again?If you believe that inflation is above all the product of strong wage growth, then cutting interest rates prematurely could cause prices to rise even more. This is the view the Fed appears to hold. “Right now, given the strength of the labor market and progress on inflation so far, it’s appropriate to allow restrictive policy further time to work,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a Q&A session following the release of March’s inflation data. Translation: The economy is still too hot, and we aren’t cutting interest rates any time soon.[Michael Powell: What the upper-middle class left doesn’t get about inflation]If, however, you believe that the last mile of inflation is a product of statistical lags, keeping interest rates high makes little sense. In fact, high interest rates may paradoxically be pushing inflation higher than it otherwise would be. Many homeowners, for instance, have responded to spiking interest rates by staying put to preserve the cheap mortgages they secured when rates were lower (why give up a 3 percent mortgage rate for a 7 percent one?). This “lock-in effect” has restricted the supply of available homes, which drives up the prices.High rates may also be partly responsible for auto-insurance costs. Insurance companies often invest their customers’ premium payments in safe assets, such as government bonds. When interest rates rose, however, the value of government bonds fell dramatically, leaving insurers with huge losses on their balance sheets. As The New York Times’s Talmon Joseph Smith reports, one reason auto-insurance companies have raised their premiums is to help cover those losses. In other words, in the two categories where inflation has been the most persistent, interest rates may be propping up the exact high prices that they are supposed to be lowering.The Fed’s “wait and see” approach comes with other risks as well. Already, high rates have jacked up the costs of major life purchases, made a dysfunctional housing market even more so, and triggered a banking crisis. They haven’t made a dent in America’s booming labor market—yet. But the longer rates stay high, the greater the chance that the economy begins to buckle under the pressure. Granted, Powell has stated that if unemployment began to rise, the Fed would be willing to cut rates. But lower borrowing costs won’t translate into higher spending overnight. It could take months, even years, for them to have their full effect. A lot of people could lose their jobs in the meantime.Given where inflation seemed to be headed at the beginning of this year, the fact that the Federal Reserve finds itself in this position at all is frustrating. But given where prices were 18 months ago, it is something of a miracle. Back then, the Fed believed it would be forced to choose between a 1970s-style inflation crisis or a painful recession; today it is deciding between slightly higher-than-typical inflation or a somewhat-less-stellar economy. That doesn’t make the central bank’s decision any easier, but it should perhaps make the rest of us a bit less stressed about it.

What Taylor Swift Sees in “The Albatross”

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theatlantic.com

How do you get the albatross off your neck? You know, your albatross. Your own dank collar of bird carcass, bespoke feathery deadweight of shame/rage/neurosis/solipsism/the past/whatever, the price of being you as it feels on a bad day … How do you let it drop?In Taylor Swift’s “The Albatross”—a bonus track on her new double album, The Tortured Poets Department—the albatross is a person. A woman, to be precise. “She’s the albatross / She is here to destroy you.” Which could be a trope from some slab of 1970s misogynist boogie, Bad Company or Nazareth howling about a faithless woman and her evil ways, etc., etc., but—because this is Taylor Swift—it isn’t.Let me quickly locate myself in the Taylorverse. I’m a “Bad Blood”/“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” guy. I like the bangers, the big tunes. Midnights was not my cup of tea: overdetermined as to lyrics (too many words), underpowered as to melodies (not enough tunes). For me, it was as if she’d taken the DNA of a maundering, heavy-breathing, medium-Swift song like Reputation’s “Dress” and unraveled it over a whole album, abetted by the soupy skills of Jack Antonoff. But what do I know? Midnights was one of the biggest albums of all time. And now, less than two years later: The Tortured Poets Department. And: “The Albatross.”[Read: Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues]Sonically, musically, we’re in Folklore territory with this song: the strings; the wending, woodwindy vocal line; the tender electronica; the muted mood; the pewter wash of tastefulness. Chamber music, if the chamber in question has been decorated by Bed Bath & Beyond. Is there a tune? I mean, kind of. Not one you’re going to be bellowing in a toneless rapture at the wheel of your car, but it’s there.Lyrically, however, things are more lively. There’s this woman, the albatross: a bad habit, a bad relationship, a self-ensnaring situation, a bundle of familiar negatives (“Devils that you know / Raise worse hell than a stranger”). People have warned you about this person. She’s bad news! And Swift, ever-alert to the opprobrium of the herd, cannot help identifying with her. The voice shifts to the first person: “Locked me up in towers / But I’d visit in your dreams.” Reputation-style vibes of slander and persecution are felt: “Wise men once read fake news / And they believed it / Jackals raised their hackles …” As always, the Swifties are speculating: Who’s this song for? Who is it about? Joe Alwyn? Travis Kelce—and the warnings he got when he started dating Swift? Is she his own stubborn albatross?By the end of the song, the singer herself has assumed the form of the albatross, and is flapping in to perform a “rescue.” “The devil that you know / Looks now more like an angel.” Embrace your shadow? Embrace your albatross? Embrace your partner with your own long-feathered and doom-laden albatross wings?This is not how it usually goes with albatrosses.[Read: Travis Kelce is another puzzle for Taylor Swift fans to crack]Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the source, the fons et origo, of the albatross metaphor. In the Rime, a sailor shoots an albatross, and brings a curse upon his ship. Why does he shoot the albatross? No reason, or none given in the poem. Maybe it’s the old existentialist acte gratuit, more than a century early: Maybe he does it because the sun is in his eyes, like Meursault in Camus’s L’Étranger. He shoots it, anyway, prangs it with his crossbow, and the wind drops, and the ship slides into a hell-sea, and the dead bird, as punishment and emblem of shame, is hung around his neck.Back, then, to our question: How do you get rid of the albatross?Coleridge, fortunately for us, was very clear on this: You bless the water snakes. It’s all in Part IV of the Rime. The ship is becalmed, the sea is rancid, the crew are dead, and the Mariner—albatross slung Björk-ishly around his neck—is sitting on the deck in a state of nightmare. Meaning, purpose, a following wind: all gone. Perished with his shipmates. Now he’s in a scummy realm, a realm of mere biological outlasting. “And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I …”But. However. And yet. With nothing else to do, with no phone to look at, he watches the slimy things as they writhe and flare in the water, super-white in the moonlight, darker and more luxuriously hued when in the shadow cast by the ship itself. And something happens. His heart opens. Or perhaps it breaks. He is mutely, selflessly stirred and awakened. With his core, from his core, he spontaneously exalts what is before him: He blesses the water snakes.And with a complicated downy loosening, and maybe a glancing clang from its beak, the albatross—fatal baggage of a bird—falls off into the sea.Taylor Swift is not the first musician to engage with albatrossness. There’s Fleetwood Mac’s beautiful instrumental “Albatross” from 1968—slow celestial wingbeats, bluesy exhalations over a dazzling sea. There’s Public Image Ltd’s trudging, splintering “Albatross” from 1979, interpersonal, more in the Swift vein: “I know you very well / You are unbearable.” Corrosion of Conformity’s “Albatross” is a kind of sludge-rocking, negatively charged “Free Bird”: “You can call me lazy / You can call me wrong … Albatross, fly on, fly on.”But for the full Coleridgean thing, the full voyage, nothing beats Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The live version, preferably. This is a straight-up workingman’s adaptation of the poem, 14 minutes of galumphing rock opera, Coleridge’s words doggedly paraphrased by Maiden bassist–vision guy Steve Harris, and it succeeds spectacularly. Especially at the water-snakes moment, which the band orchestrates to perfection: a flicked and rushing pattern on the hi-hat, a trebly-warbly melodic figure on the bass, palm-muted chug-a-chug of one, then two (then three?) guitars, the tension blissfully building until Bruce Dickinson, with soaring all-gobbling theatricality, sings it out. “Then the spell starts to BREAK / The albatross falls from his NECK / Sinks down like LEAD / Into the SEA / Then down in falls comes the” [King Diamond–style infernal androgynous scream] “RAAAAAAIIN!!”So what are the water snakes? Coleridge’s Rime is not, for me, an allegory, so the water snakes are not representing or symbolizing something. They are something. A coiling and uncoiling beautiful-terrible, playful-awful force that breaks the surface in snaky loops and flashes. Wonderfully indifferent to us, horrifyingly indifferent to us. But mysteriously in relationship with us, because it is in our eyes that these water snakes, these incandescent reptiles, these limbless creatures of the deep, are made holy. We are the ones who can bless them.And you can’t decide to bless the water snakes, that’s the point. It’s not about gratitude. It’s not about improving your mental health. No squint of effort, no knotting or unknotting of the frontal lobes will get you there. The blessing arises by itself, or it doesn’t arise at all. Total brain bypass: a love so simple and helpless it barely even knows what it’s loving.[Read: James Parker on the Rick Rubin guide to creativity]So it becomes a question of orienting oneself to the possibility of this love. How to do it? I’m out of my depth here—which is just as it should be, for here we are in the zone of the mystics and the mega-meditators. We are full fathom five, where your feet don’t touch anything, because there’s nothing to touch. If you’re the Ancient Mariner—or perhaps if you’re addicted to opiates, as Coleridge was—you’ll have to go through it, all of it. You’ll have to be carried to the end of yourself. The blessing of the water snakes happens at the Mariner’s clinical bottoming-out: when he’s utterly isolated, on a suppurating sea, besieged by the forces of death.The rest of us, maybe we don’t have to go—or be taken—that far. Maybe there are other, less drastic, more everyday opportunities and invitations for us to be broken down and opened up. For our grip on the albatross to be unclenched. For the love to pour through us like Iron Maiden. For the albatross itself to wrap its angelic Taylor Swift wings around your inner Travis Kelce.One way or another, though, sooner or later, gently or with loud sunderings and burstings, it’s going to happen. Life, thank God—it’ll get you and get you again.This article has been adapted from James Parker’s upcoming book, Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes: Odes to Being Alive.

The Point of Having a Spiritual Quest

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Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.The United States has long had a great deal of religious diversity, and was built on the idea of religious tolerance. But one type of belief was always rare: none. Until recently, that is. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who profess no religion (as opposed even to having one that they rarely or never practice) has risen from 16 percent in 2007 to 29 percent in 2021. (Back in the early 1970s, only about 5 percent of Americans espoused this position.)This phenomenon of declining belief is of great concern to many religious leaders, as one can easily imagine. The Catholic theologian and bishop Robert Barron has built an enormous internet-based ministry in no small part by seeking to reach these so-called nones. Rather than simply railing against a secular culture, Barron turns the criticism around and calls the growth of this disavowal “an unnerving commentary on the effectiveness of our evangelical strategies.”The growing phenomenon of the nones, however, is not evidence of a lack of interest in spiritual life. Many today who previously fell away from their faith—or never had one to begin with—are seeking something faith-like in their life. They are open to thinking about such commitments, but just don’t know what to look for. Maybe this describes you. If so, ironically, the research data on why people say they became nones in the first place might hold the answer of what to focus on to set you on your spiritual path.In tracking the rise of the nones in American religious life, Pew has also studied people who had faith in childhood but left it in adulthood. In 87 percent of the cases, this came down to one of three reasons: They stopped believing (49 percent), they felt too uncertain (18 percent), or they didn’t like the way the faith was practiced (20 percent). More concisely, most people leave their faith because of belief, feeling, or practice.[Derek Thompson: The true cost of the churchgoing bust]These are the reasons people quit religion, but we can also infer that these same three aspects of religious experience are central to maintaining faith—or to finding it anew and then keeping it. You might say that belief, feeling, and practice are the macronutrients—the necessary elements—of healthy faith. With only one of them, you will be spiritually malnourished: Belief alone is desiccated theory; by itself, feeling is unreliable sentimentality; practice in isolation is dogmatism. To build a new, sustaining spiritual diet, you need to focus on all three.Many great thinkers have made essentially this point. For example, the ardently religious Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote in his book of daily pensées, A Calendar of Wisdom, that in times of trouble, “you have to embrace what the wisdom of humanity, your intellect, and your heart tell you: that the meaning of life is to serve the force that sent you into the world.”Feeling is fundamental to religious experience, as scholarship on emotion has shown. Some religions elevate trancelike states of ecstasy, such as samadhi in both Hinduism and Buddhism, which involves complete meditative absorption. Most faiths emphasize the role of the emotional adoration of the divine, as in the Prophet Muhammad’s teaching that believers should “love Allah with all of your hearts.” One cannot rely on feeling alone, however, because it is so mutable. As the 16th-century founder of the Jesuit Order, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, noted, faith features feelings of not only consolation but also desolation, at moments when God feels absent from one’s life.The second element of faith is belief, which are tenets you have accepted as truths, at least provisionally. These truths are not testable as scientific propositions are, so, in Thomas Aquinas’s definition, they are the “mean between science and opinion.” These are the propositions that you learn from reading and listening to other believers, and that you ultimately choose to accept; examples would be God’s laws for the Jewish people or the Eightfold Path to enlightenment for Buddhists.Accepting such beliefs as truth does not mean they’re impossible to revise. In fact, research has shown that spiritual people are generally open to reflection on existential questions and willing to modify their views. But these tenets of faith are based on considered arguments, rather than feelings, so they tend to be stable and enduring.[Peter Wehner: David Brooks’s journey toward faith]Finally, religious practice offers a set of actions and rituals that you commit to observing in order to demonstrate your adherence to the faith for yourself and others. This is the element of faith that takes it out of the realm of abstraction and makes it part of your real, physical life. You can say you believe in the ideas of Zen, but Zen itself will not become a meaningful part of your life until you practice Zen meditation. Similarly, you can say you believe in the divine inspiration of the Quran, but that doesn’t mean much if you don’t actually read it.You might assume that any practice requires both belief and feeling—entailing that, for example, you would feel impelled to go to a political demonstration only if you already believed in the cause. But you may have noticed the opposite occurring in your life: If you go to a demonstration uncommitted, you may find that the experience stimulates feelings and belief, which might then lead you to go to future demonstrations.This is a basic form of what academics call “path dependence,” a phenomenon in which past decisions lead to similar actions in future. The concept is usually used by economists and political scientists to explain institutional inertia or resistance to organizational change, but the same principle can suggestively be applied to individual human behavior. Such path dependence can be affected by both positive and negative feedback, the sense either that people’s choices elicit increasing returns or that they are self-reinforcing or “locked in.”That feedback loop can be a problem if your religious practice makes you become rigid in your ideology; economists, for example, have modeled that voter path dependence might be one of the causes of our increasing polarization. As it pertains to faith, the trick, then, is to be wary of your path dependence if it results in negative feedback: If you feel or behave like a “locked-in” party-line voter, you might be too rigid in your belief. Yet if you use path dependence on your faith exclusively for positive feedback—that is, your belief elicits increasing returns, perhaps boosting your altruism, community ties, or sense of meaning in life—then you will be using it as a force for good.Put simply, be completely honest with yourself about why you’re practicing your faith; if your belief spurs positive feedback, carry on.[Faith Hill: The messy line between faith and reason]A healthy faith thus requires all three sources of spiritual nourishment. The data suggest that when one or more of those elements—of belief, feeling, and practice—are missing, people fall away. So if you’re looking for faith in your life, you need to seek all three.Here is an optimal way to do so. In Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, he quotes an ancient Chinese proverb: “Those who know the rules of true wisdom are baser than those who love them. Those who love them are baser than those who follow them.” In other words, to develop a healthy faith, practice is more important than feeling, and feeling is more important than belief. This implies the reverse of what most people do to develop a spiritual life: They read and think to acquire knowledge and opinions—that is, beliefs—then they see if they “feel” their faith, and only then will they move on to practicing it. But as the proverb implies, this order of priorities won’t work very well.The right approach is to start practicing, notwithstanding your current state of belief and feeling. If the practice evokes sentiment in you, then study the faith to develop knowledge and opinions. This is an experimental, hands-on approach, much in the manner of how many inventions and innovations come about: An inventor tries something, sees whether it works, and then figures out precisely what’s going on.In a faith context, this means that you might go to a service of worship a few times. Then you could interrogate your feelings as to whether the services stimulated something deep within (or, alternatively, whether they left you cold). Finally, if the former feels true, you could start investigating the belief system intellectually.[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]The three elements of faith can be useful to apply to many parts of life, not just your spiritual quest. Consider marriage, for instance: Without the feelings of love and affection, a relationship is dead; without knowledge and opinions about your spouse, it has no depth; without practicing the rituals of love, your partnership will wither. This same algorithmic progression of faith can also map out your path to marriage. You start out with practice in the form of a date; you continue the relationship if you feel attraction and the beginnings of love; the pairing develops as you gain knowledge and form favorable opinions about your partner.Obviously, this connubial example is not a random one. To find faith is to find a form of love—a love of the divine, or a rapturous spiritual connection with the universe. But like all good and worthwhile things in life, faith and love merit deep thought and serious effort.

In Search of America Aboard the Icon of the Seas

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In January, the writer Gary Shteyngart spent a week of his life on the inaugural voyage of the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship ever. Like many a great novelist before him, he went in search of the “real” America. He left his Russian novels at home, bought some novelty T-shirts, and psychically prepared to be the life of the party. About halfway through, Shteyngart called his editor and begged to be allowed to disembark and fly home. His desperate plea was rejected, resulting in a semi-sarcastic daily log of his misery.In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Shteyngart discusses his “seven agonizing nights” on the cruise ship, where he roamed from mall to bar to infinity pool trying to make friends. He shares his theories about why cruise lovers nurture an almost spiritual devotion to an experience that, to him, inspires material for a “low-rent White Lotus.” And he shares what happened when cruise lovers actually read what he wrote about their beloved ship.Listen to the conversation here:Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket CastsThe following is a transcript of the episode:Gary Shteyngart: Hi.Hanna Rosin: Hi. It’s Hanna.Shteyngart: Hi, Hanna. How are you?Rosin: Good.Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.Shteyngart: It’s cloudy here.Rosin: It is? In a good way? In a way that makes your hair look full and rich?Shteyngart: Oh, yeah.(Laughs.) It does add fullness to my hair, which is always a good thing at this point. I think spring has finally sprung. And I teach in the spring semester, and I’m like, God, I just want this to be over. I just want to go out and play.Rosin: You teach fiction?Shteyngart: Yeah. I can’t teach rocket science.Rosin: (Laughs.)Shteyngart: Cruising technology.Rosin: This is writer Gary Shteyngart.Rosin: There’s just a Russian stereotype.Shteyngart: (Laughs.)Rosin: I’m like, You could teach astronomy or physics. I don’t know.Shteyngart: Chess.Rosin: Chess. Exactly.Rosin: Gary Shteyngart grew up in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S. when he was 7. He’s written several award-winning novels, and he was a “literary consultant” on Succession, the HBO show.Mostly, he is known for his satire, which can range from gentle to deadly. So who better to write an article about the inaugural voyage of the largest cruise ship ever built?Shteyngart: This whole thing came about because I was on Twitter, and I saw a tweet that just showed the—may I use salty language here?Rosin: Yes.Shteyngart: The ass of the ship is how I describe it. I don’t know any of these terms, but, you know, with all the water parks and crap on it. And so I reposted the tweet, and I said, If somebody wants to send me on this cruise, please specify the level of sarcasm desired.Rosin: Really? (Laughs.)Shteyngart: And then—God bless The Atlantic—within seconds, I had an assignment.Rosin: That ass belongs to the Icon of the Seas, a ship that can hold more than 7,000 passengers and 2,000 crew. It has 20 decks with seven swimming pools and six waterslides. The ship itself is about five times bigger than the Titanic. And I’m pretty sure the Titanic did not have a swim-up bar, much less the world’s largest swim-up bar.In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Gary describes it this way: “The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots … This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.”To prepare for that voyage, Gary wore a meatball T-shirt he found in a store in Little Italy. More specifically, the shirt read: “Daddy’s Little Meatball.”Shteyngart: You know, I grew up in Queens and, being a spicy meat-a-ball, I thought it was funny. A lot of cruisers were angry. They thought I was being sexual or sexualizing. It’s very interesting because I thought that T-shirt was the bond between a child and his daddy or her daddy.Rosin: (Laughs.) You thought it’d just be a conversation starter.Shteyngart: I thought it’d be a conversation starter. If they had a “Mommy’s Little Meatball” T-shirt, that would’ve been preferable. I feel much more a mommy’s little meatball. But they only have daddy.I actually thought, My expectations are low, but I bet I’m going to run into awesome people. And I love to drink and chat, and this is—I guess that’s what you do on a cruise ship. And I knew I was going to have a suite, so I was like, Maybe I’ll throw a suite party.Rosin: (Laughs.)Shteyngart: Invite some people over. On land, I really am quite sociable. I remember I was just leaving a Columbia—I teach at Columbia—leaving a Columbia party, and somebody was saying, Well, there goes 75 percent of the party.Rosin: Oh, that’s a compliment.Shteyngart: It’s a compliment. I’m kind of a party animal. So I was super—I thought, you know, Look, 5,000 people. I’m going to find a soulmate or two.Rosin: Great writers before Gary have deluded themselves in this way before. Most notably: David Foster Wallace, who ended up spending much of his cruise adventure alone in his cabin. They venture out, looking to swim with some “real Americans.” And instead, they are quickly confronted by the close-up details, like the nightly entertainment—Shteyngart: There was a kind of packaged weirdness in the shows. Goddamn—the ice-skating tribute to the periodic table. What the hell was that?Rosin: The food—Shteyngart: It did not have the consistency of steak. It was like some kind of pleathery, weird—like this poor cow had been slapped around before it died.Rosin: And the physical touch of an actual “real American.”Shteyngart: He’d throw his arms around them drunkenly, and they’d be like, Ehh.First of all, I just want to say, Royal Caribbean—the people that run it are geniuses. The CEO’s name is—I’m not making this up—Jason Liberty.Rosin: (Laughs.)Shteyngart: His name is Liberty! I mean, I don’t know. What the hell? Like, exactly, if I was to write a novel character with, you know, Jason Liberty, people would be like, Oh, he’s being pretentious. But no. That’s his actual name.I think they know the tastes of their clientele so well and are able to mirror it back to them, but also to give them this feeling that they’re awesome for doing something like this. One of my favorite slogans—you get all this literature—This isn’t a vacation day spent. It’s bragging rights earned.Rosin: Mmm. It’s velvet ropey, like you’re in a club.Shteyngart: It’s a velvet ropey situation. You are an adventurer. You’ve earned this. You have bragging rights. But when you enter the ship, you’re in a mall. And the mall is large and multileveled, and you can buy a Rolex at three times what it would cost on land and all this other crap.And then there’s all these neighborhoods, and you can do whatever the hell you want. You can get trashed or have sex, which, whatever—I mean with your spouse, although there were some swingers on board. But you could do whatever you want in a way that you can’t on land, in a way, I think, because so many of these people are just working their asses off.Rosin: Right.Shteyngart: That was a topic of conversation that came up. People were like, Yeah, I work 90 hours a week, and this is my chance to just, you know, be blotto.Rosin: You’re hinting at this. Part of being on a ship is being inducted into the language and the levels of the ship, and can you walk us through that? You mentioned, for example: You walk in, you’re in a mall. But I bet, eventually, you start to see more. What are the neighborhoods? You said the word neighborhoods. What does that even mean? And what are the distinctions?Shteyngart: I think this ship and other Royal Caribbean ships of this size—although this is the biggest—try to create this idea of a city, like you’re in a city that happens to be at sea.One of the funniest neighborhoods is called Central Park, which is literally another mall but with a couple of shrubs growing out here and there. I thought that was really funny—also, using a New York City landmark in one of the least New Yorkiest milieus in the world.Rosin: I guess it just has to be terms—a word—people recognize. And people vaguely recognize it. They don’t need to know about Olmsted or live in Brooklyn.Shteyngart: (Laughs.) No, no.Rosin: They just vaguely recognize Central Park.Shteyngart: It’d be funny if I asked—boy, would I get a lot of flak if I came up to a cruiser and be like, I don’t think this really matches Olmsted’s vision of Central Park. I don’t know. Meatball not happy. Maybe I should have used a Russian accent. Like, Hello. I am Meatball.Rosin: Meatball not happy.Shteyngart: Meatball not happy with Olmsted. So there’s that. There’s Surfside, which is a very funny kind of Disneyland for kids with—Rosin: And are you walking—like, I still don’t get it. So you go in, and how big is a neighborhood? And then how do you get to the next neighborhood?Shteyngart: Right, so everything’s on decks, so you take these elevators. I think I spent half the cruise on elevators just going from one place to another.Rosin: Yeah.Shteyngart: But I thought I would be in the Suites neighborhood. Because this whole thing—and Royal Caribbean is also brilliant at this. These people—really, a Nobel Prize in Economics. It’s a constant scramble. You constantly want a higher status, especially if you’ve been cruising forever. You want to reach Pinnacle status, which you have to do after 700 days (or nights, rather) on the ship, which is two years, right? Almost.Rosin: Wow. And so what does that get you?Shteyngart: So the Pinnacles have their own—I mean, there’s some priority things they get. Like, I was not allowed to go into one dining room at one point, and the guy—I didn’t know what Pinnacle was, so I thought the guy was saying, It’s just pendejo dining. He had a thick accent. I was like, I’m wearing a meatball T-shirt. I am the essence of pendejo. And he was like, No, no, pendejos only. But he was trying to say Pinnacles, I guess. So that kind of stuff.They have their own little lounge, which I wasn’t allowed into. And some of the other cruisers who are not Pinnacles but have somehow gotten into the lounge, they’re very angry about being denied. And they’re like, There’s nothing in there. There’s just a coffee machine in there.But the other thing is the suite status, which I had because by the time The Atlantic commissioned this piece, almost all the cabins were sold out. Everybody wanted to be on this ship, and all that was left was a $19,000—Jesus Christ—$19,000 suite that didn’t even look out on the sea.Rosin: Wow.Shteyngart: It looked out on the mall or whatever. But it looked like the Marriott, in a way, which—I like Marriotts—I’m just saying.Rosin: So it’s just a plain—it’s like a hotel room.Shteyngart: It’s like a hotel room.Rosin: With a window.Shteyngart: And I had two bathrooms.Rosin: For yourself?Shteyngart: Just for myself, I know. Well, I think the idea of these suites is that more than one person goes on them, right?But there’s this—the Royal Bling. The Royal Bling is the jewelry store, such as it is, on board. And they introduced this thing called the something chalice. It’s a $100,000 chalice, and it entitles you to drink for free on Royal Caribbean once you’ve bought it.So this thing is hilarious. Just the concept of it is insane. Everyone’s trying to figure out: Should I buy this? What’s up with this? Should I get it for my 28-year-old kid? Will it earn out? How much does he drink? How much can I drink?So I talked to the wonderful Serbian sales lady. Everyone’s country of origin, if you’re on the crew, is listed on their tag.Rosin: Really?Shteyngart: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Rosin: That’s weird.Shteyngart: So you’re like, Oh, it’s Amir from Pakistan, or whatever.Rosin: That’s so weird.Shteyngart: Yeah. And she was, I don’t know, something Olga from Serbia, and she was amazing. They’re all amazing. Every crew member is excellent.And she was like, Well—she was trying to sell me the $100,000 chalice. I said, It’s really gold? And she’s like, No, it’s gold-plated. We couldn’t afford. She said, If it was really gold, it would be, like, a million dollars. I’m like, Okay. And then it has diamonds, and she’s like, Well, they’re actually cubic zirconia, again, because it would cost, like, $10 million if they were diamonds. I’m like, All right, this thing is sounding worse and worse.And then she said, But, you know, if you already have everything, this is one more thing you can have. And I thought that was almost like a Zen haiku, but about the American condition. If you already have everything, this is one more thing you can have.[Music]Rosin: So the ship has neighborhoods and levels and status in a very explicit way. And cruisers care about that. They care about it in a very deep, almost spiritual way that Gary didn’t quite appreciate until after he’d written the story.Shteyngart: One of the funniest things—somebody was telling me to look this up on, I guess, Reddit.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Shteyngart: There’s a huge cruising community. I think half a million people are on that thing and, boy, were they pissed!Rosin: That’s after the break.[Break]Rosin: During his time on the Icon of the Seas, Gary Shteyngart met a few memorable characters. There was the younger couple he called, “Mr. and Mrs. Ayn Rand,” who he drank with a few times. And the couple’s couple friends, he described as quote: “bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.” And then, there was “Duck Necklace.”Shteyngart: He’s fascinating. He was drunk all the time, and he was being arrested—there is a security force—for photobombing.Rosin: I wonder if the laws are different on the ship. Like photobombing is a felony.Shteyngart: I’d love to do Law & Order: Icon of the Seas. That would be amazing.Rosin: (Laughs.) Right.Shteyngart: But then he went on this long, drunken, very elegiac thing about, Well, I’m 62, and if I fall off the ship, I’m fine with that. I just don’t want a shark to eat me. And I believe in God, and the Mayans have a prophecy. He just went on and on. And then I looked him up and, when not drunk and getting arrested on a ship, he’s the pillar of his community in North Chicago. There’s so much more to this guy. So he was my favorite, I think.Rosin: So maybe the ship creates a space where, if you’re grinding and working every day and being a pillar of the community, the ship is your space to contemplate and be philosophical or be an idiot or whatever it is you can’t be elsewhere.Shteyngart: Yeah. And I think you’re right. And I think a couple of people, especially older people—I mean, 62 isn’t that old—but a couple of the older people were trying to summarize their lives through their cruising experiences, including, for one woman, realizing that she wanted to divorce her husband. All these things happened on cruises.It’s like the cruise is the time when they’re—the way people say when you’re off land, it’s the rules of the sea. You’re in international waters; you can do whatever you want. I think for some people, the cruise affords them some weird way to look back on their lives and to make large decisions or to celebrate either happy moments or sometimes almost-elegiac moments. There were all these people who looked like they were about to die.Rosin: Literally?Shteyngart: Literally about to die, clearly coming off of chemo or on an oxygen tank. Or they had T-shirts celebrating a good cancer remission. So definitely there’s—and I hope this article, despite its very satirical tone, lends some of that poignancy. Because people are people, and this is the kind of stuff that they want to do, either to make an important moment in their lives or to think on the things that have happened to them.But I think that’s one of the reasons people were so butt hurt on that Reddit—to use a term of art—because I wasn’t just going after a hobby or something. I was going after something that is so key to their identity.Rosin: That’s interesting that people perceived it so badly. You both appreciated the earnestness of it and made fun of it at the same time. It was satirical but also present.Shteyngart: I don’t know. I think people really wanted a quote-unquote “journalist” to give an honest review of the ship. But look, I got this assignment by saying, What level of sarcasm do you want? But I didn’t deliver 11 on the sarcasm scale. I think it was, like, six or seven.I realized the humor part of this—and this is what I talk about in my humor class—the human comedy is that no one understands quite who they are. So I may go around thinking I’m a giraffe, and I keep talking about, Oh, I’m so tall, and I eat leaves off of tall trees. But in reality, I’m an aardvark. I’m a small furry creature, burrowing in the bush.And that, to me, felt like a lot of what people were saying on the ship. People would say, I feel like I’m on an adventure. And I’m like, Yes, but we’re in a mall, as you say this, that’s slowly steaming to all these islands. But many of the passengers wouldn’t even get off on these islands. They love the ship so much they wouldn’t leave.And I’ll say this, also: One of the most important things that happened to me—I was in Charlotte Amalie, which I guess is the capital of the U.S. Virgin Islands or Saint Thomas, and I’d wandered off the beaten path. And this elderly Rastafarian gentleman looked at me, and with the most—I’ve never been talked to like this—but with a sneer beyond anything, he said, Redneck.And I guess I did have a red neck at this point, and I was wearing this vibrant cap with the Icon of the Seas Royal Caribbean logo. But I realized, also, that people hate these cruisers. They hate what they do to their islands, their environment, everything. There’s just so much more happening here than just a bunch of drunken Americans on a ship.And this also goes to the fact that, obviously, there’s all these people, mostly from the global South, working below decks. They work nonstop. And it’s interesting because a lot of the passengers, they would say, Wow, these people work so hard, with a kind of like, Oh, I wish everybody back home would work so hard, or something like that. But at the same time, I was listening to a comedy act, and the comedian was making fun of quote-unquote “shithole countries.”So there’s definitely a kind of—even though cruisers keep talking about how much they love the people on the ship, it doesn’t translate.Rosin: It doesn’t translate. It doesn’t translate into politics.Okay, I’m turning it back on you—your story. You came into the boat with the story that Gary is a party guy, and Gary’s gonna have parties in Gary’s suite. So what did you realize along the way?Shteyngart: Yeah, it was like being an immigrant all over again. And, for me, assimilation into America was a very, very long process. So the meatball, or the lack of success of the meatball, really reminded me of that, too—like I’m always a step behind.And this did feel like, Oh, I was always a step behind. People would have casual conversations in the elevators, just shooting the shit, and I would try to banter with them. But I would always get it a little bit wrong, and I would realize it, too. Like, there was a lot of wind one day, and I was like, Oof, the frost is really on the pumpkin.Rosin: (Laughs.)Shteyngart: But I realized that that’s probably said in the fall, right? Before Thanksgiving. Is that right? The pumpkin is, you know—Rosin: So Immigrant Gary comes roaring back in those moments.Shteyngart: Oh, my god.Rosin: You want to be, like, Sophisticated Writer Gary.Shteyngart: Absolutely. So I was always sweating bullets. Like, I want to get into the conversation. And this was a big thing because there was a big contest, several contests—the semifinals or something? Quarterfinals? I don’t know—between the big teams. And I had no idea what the hell was going on, but everybody was talking about it. And everybody was wearing paraphernalia—that’s the other thing.Rosin: Paraphernalia. (Laughs.) You’re referring to team T-shirts.Shteyngart: But also everything! I don’t know. Name it: hats, T-shirts, all kinds of crap. And I had nothing. I had meatball, you know.Rosin: Right.Shteyngart: Look, the preparation for this article should have—I should have bought T-shirts with sports.Rosin: (Laughs.) T-shirts with sports.Shteyngart: And then I should have talked to people about all the rules of football. Maybe there’s a documentary that I can watch, something like that. And then maybe that would have been it.Rosin: Okay, so I’m reading this essay about this cruise ship, which has a little bit of politics, a little bit of cult, a little bit of status obsession. What am I understanding about America?Shteyngart: Well, I think we are, in some ways, a country that has been losing religion for a while. I know this is a strange approach to it, but people are looking for something to fill the void. Especially, among the hardworking middle class I think is where you feel it quite a bit. And I think because Americans are never satisfied, everyone’s always looking for, What’s my ancestry? Where do I come from? Somehow just the term American is not enough to fulfill people’s expectations of what life is.Rosin: Of what they belong to. Like, what they’re rooted in. Yeah.Shteyngart: And for me, this is an easier question because I actually just want to be an American. I’m an immigrant who just wants to be an American, right?So, on this ship, what I was seeing was people desperately trying to belong to some kind of idea. And I feel like the cruising life, because these people are so obsessed with the cruises that they wear these—half the people or more were wearing T-shirts somehow commemorating this voyage on the first day of the cruise. So I think I really offended a religion. I insulted not just a strange hobby that people engage in, but a way of life.And I think that’s the future. Trying to understand America today is to try to understand people desperately grasping for something in the absence of more traditional ideas of what it means to an American, right? And this is one strange manifestation of that. But it was, for me, an ultimately unfulfilling one.[Music]You know, God bless David Foster Wallace for being brilliant enough to start the genre, although there were a couple pieces before him, but the modern incarnation of this. Let’s stop this. I did not solve the question of what America is. None of that got solved.Rosin: So what are we R.I.P.ing? We’re not just R.I.P.ing the cruise ship piece? I just want to end the episode this way. R.I.P. what?Shteyngart: No, no, no, no. I don’t have that kind of cultural might.Rosin: (Laughs.)Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Isabel Cristo, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.Rosin: But was there a monkey on the ship?Shteyngart: No, there wasn’t. The monkey was on Saint Kitts.Rosin: Oh, okay. I remembered that wrong.Shteyngart: No, no, no. The Royal Caribbean did not spring for a monkey. They had a golden retriever, and he wore, like, a cap or something? But see, so everybody was going gaga, and I’m like, You’ve never seen a golden freaking retriever? What kind of lives do you live on land?Rosin: Right, right. But it’s an Icon golden retriever, so it’s different.Shteyngart: It’s an Icon golden retriever, and he’s, like, I guess, an emotional support dog for these people.

How Bird Flu Is Shaping People’s Lives

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.For the past couple of years, scientists have watched with growing concern as a massive outbreak of avian flu, also known as H5N1 bird flu, has swept through bird populations. Recently in the U.S., a farm worker and some cattle herds have been infected. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covered the virus’s spread in North America, about the risk of human infection and how, for animals, this has already been “a pandemic many times over.”First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Welcome to the TikTok meltdown. The Republicans who want American carnage Columbia has resorted to pedagogy theater. Not a Five-Alarm FireLora Kelley: How does this bird-flu outbreak compare with previous ones?Katherine J. Wu: When we’re considering the toll on nonhuman animals, this is the largest, most deadly H5N1 outbreak that has been recorded in North America. It has been unfolding slowly for about two and a half years now, but it’s become a gargantuan wave at this point.Lora: Wow—how alarmed are you by that?Katherine: I’m medium concerned—and I have been medium concerned for a couple of years now. It’s difficult to gauge the amount of alarm to feel, because it’s so unprecedented. Still, most H5N1 outbreaks in the past have totally fizzled without much consequence, especially in this part of the world.I am worried because so many species have been getting sick. A huge number of wild birds have been infected, including species that haven’t been affected in the past. And we’ve seen these massive outbreaks in domesticated chickens, which are packed together in farms.Avian flu is known to be a bird problem. Beyond that, we’ve been seeing these outbreaks in mammals for a couple of years now, which is more concerning because, of course, we are also mammals. Humans seem to be potentially susceptible to infection, but at the same time, it would take quite a lot for this to become another big human-flu pandemic.Lora: Should we be concerned about getting sick?Katherine: People should be vigilant and paying attention to the news. But right now, as you and I are talking, there is still not a huge risk to people. You don’t get a pandemic unless you have a pathogen that spreads very, very easily among people, and there’s no evidence so far that this virus has mutated to that point.There have been some human cases globally so far, but it’s a very small number. They seem to have been cases where someone was highly exposed to the virus in domesticated animals. People got sick, but they didn’t pass it to someone else.I’m definitely not saying that person-to-person transmission can’t happen eventually, but there’s a pretty big chasm between someone getting infected and someone being able to efficiently pass the virus on. It is concerning that we continue to see more mammal species affected by H5N1, including species that have a lot of close contact with humans. But this is not a five-alarm fire so far.Lora: How will people’s lives be affected?Katherine: The virus has already affected our lives. Egg prices went completely bonkers in 2022 and early 2023, and over the course of this outbreak, more than 90 million domestic poultry have died. It’s not that all of those birds got sick—when this virus breaks out on chicken farms, it’s generally considered good practice to cull the chickens to halt the spread. Still, when you have that many chickens dying, egg prices are going to go up.We’re probably not on track to see that with cows anytime soon. Even though this virus has now been detected in dairy cows, they aren’t getting wildly sick, and transmission doesn’t seem as efficient. I don’t think we’re going to be in a situation where we’re killing all of our dairy cows and no one can get milk.Lora: The FDA announced yesterday that genetic evidence of this bird-flu virus had been found in samples of pasteurized milk. Is it still safe to drink milk?Katherine: So far, the answer is: generally, yes, if it’s been pasteurized. Pasteurization is a process by which milk is treated with heat so that it will kill a whole bunch of pathogens, including bacteria and viruses, and H5N1 is thought to be vulnerable to this. Also, researchers have been working to test cows so they can figure out which ones are sick. Only milk from healthy cows is authorized to enter the general food supply, though the trick will be finding all the cows that are actually infected. For now, the main ways that this virus will affect us will be indirect.Lora: Is there anything that can be done to curb the spread among wild animals?Katherine: For the animal world, this has already been a “pandemic” many times over. It has been truly devastating in that respect. So many wild birds, sea lions, seals, and other creatures have died, and it’s difficult to see how people can effectively intervene out in nature. There have been very few cases in which endangered animals have received vaccines because there’s a real possibility that their populations could be 100 percent wiped out by this virus.For most other animals in the wild, there’s not a lot that can be done, except for people to pay attention to where the virus is spreading. The hope is that most animal populations will be resilient enough to get through this and develop some form of immunity.Lora: Responses to COVID became very politicized. How might the aftermath of those mitigation measures shape how people respond to this virus, especially if it becomes a greater threat to humans?Katherine: We’re so fresh off the worst days of COVID that if people were asked to buckle down or get a new vaccine, I suspect that a lot of them would be like, Not again. There is still a lot of mitigation fatigue, and many people are sick of thinking about respiratory viruses and taking measures to prevent outbreaks. And, certainly, people have lost a lot of trust in public health over the past four years.That said, H5N1 is still a flu, and people are familiar with that type of virus. We have a long history of using flu vaccines, and the government has experience making a pandemic vaccine, keeping that stockpile, and getting it out to the public. That gives me hope that at least some people will be amenable to taking the necessary preventative measures, so any potential bird-flu outbreak among humans would not turn into COVID 2.0.Related: Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choice. Bird flu has never done this before. Today’s News President Joe Biden signed into law a bipartisan foreign-aid package that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, and a measure that forces TikTok’s parent company to sell the social-media app or face an outright ban. The U.S. Supreme Court seems divided over whether a federal law can require hospitals to provide access to emergency abortions and override state-level abortion bans. George Santos, the embattled former New York representative facing multiple charges of fraud, ended his independent bid for a U.S. House seat on Long Island. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: Tesla is not the next Ford, Matteo Wong writes. It’s the next Con Ed. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani Why Did Cars Get So Expensive?By Annie Lowrey Inflation, finally, has cooled off. Prices have increased 2.5 percent over the past year, down from increases as high as 7 percent during the early pandemic. Rents are high but stabilizing. The cost of groceries is ticking up, not surging, and some goods, such as eggs, are actually getting cheaper. But American consumers are still stretching to afford one big-ticket item: their cars. The painful cost of vehicle ownership doesn’t just reflect strong demand driven by low unemployment, pandemic-related supply-chain weirdness, and high interest rates. It reflects how awful cars are for American households and American society as a whole. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic A Democrat’s case for saving Mike Johnson How baseball explains the limits of AI Culture Break Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Ashok Kumar / Getty. Listen. Taylor Swift’s music often returns to the same motifs: pathetic fallacy, the passing of time, the mythology of love. Her latest album shows how these themes have calcified in her work, Sophie Gilbert writes.Look. Take a photo tour of several of Chile’s national parks, which protect many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Welcome to the TikTok Meltdown

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So: You’ve decided to force a multibillion-dollar technology company with ties to China to divest from its powerful social-video app. Congratulations! Here’s what’s next: *awful gurgling noises*Yesterday evening, the Senate passed a bill—appended to a $95 billion foreign-aid package—that would compel ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app within about nine months or face a ban in the United States. President Joe Biden signed the bill this morning, initiating what is likely to be a rushed, chaotic, technologically and logistically complex legal process that is likely to please almost no one.The government’s case against TikTok is vague. Broadly speaking, the concern from lawmakers —offered without definitive proof of any actual malfeasance—is that the Chinese government can use TikTok, an extremely popular broadcast and consumption platform for millions of Americans, to quietly and algorithmically promote propaganda, potentially meddling in our nation’s politics. According to the U.S. State Department, the Chinese government is set on using its influence to “reshape the global information environment” and has long manipulated information, intimidated critics, and used state-run media to try to bolster the Communist Party of China’s reputation abroad. Lawmakers have also cited privacy concerns, suggesting that TikTok could turn American user data over to the CPC—again without definitive proof that this has ever occurred.This week, Senator Mark Warner told reporters that, although many young Americans are skeptical of the case against the app, “at the end of the day, they’ve not seen what Congress has seen.” But until the American public is let in on the supposed revelations included in these classified briefings, the case against TikTok will feel like it is based on little more than the vague idea that China shouldn’t own any information distribution tool that Americans use regularly. Some of the evidence may also be of dubious provenance—as Wired reported recently, a TikTok whistleblower who claims to have spoken with numerous politicians about a potential ban may have overstated his role at the company and offered numerous improbable claims about its inner workings.TikTok, for its part, has argued that it has made good-faith efforts to comply with U.S. law. In 2022, it spent $1.5 billion on data-security initiatives, including partnering with Oracle to move American user data Stateside. Under the partnership, Oracle is in charge of auditing TikTok data for compliance. But, as Forbes reported last year, some user data from American TikTok creators and businesses, including Social Security numbers, appear to have been stored on Chinese servers. Such reports are legitimately alarming but with further context might also be moot; although the ability to do so has recently been limited, for a long time, China (or anyone else for that matter) could purchase such personal information from data brokers. (In fact, China has reportedly accessed such data in the past—from American-owned companies such as Twitter and Facebook.)[Read: It’s just an app]The nuances of the government’s concerns matter, because TikTok is probably going to challenge this law based on the notion that forcing a sale or banning the app is a violation of the company’s First Amendment rights. The government will likely argue that, under Chinese ownership, the app presents a clear and present national-security threat, and hope that the phrase acts as a cheat code to compel the courts without further evidence.Nobody knows what is going to happen, and part of the reason is that the entire process has been rushed, passed under the cover of a separate and far more pressing bill that includes humanitarian aid to Gaza, weapons aid for Israel, and money to assist the Ukrainian war effort. This tactic is common among legislators, but in this case, the TikTok bill’s hurried passage masks any attempts to game out the logistics of a TikTok ban or divestiture.Setting aside the possibility that the courts declare the law unconstitutional, here are just a few of the glaring logistical issues facing the legislation: First, recommendation algorithms—in TikTok’s case, the code that determines what individual users see on the app and the boogeyman at the center of this particular congressional moral panic—are part of China’s export-control list. The country must approve the sale of that technology, and, as one expert told NPR recently, the Chinese government has said unequivocally that it will not do so. TikTok’s potential buyer may, in essence, be purchasing a brand, a user base, and a user interface, without its most precious proprietary ingredient.This might make for a tough sell, which raises the second issue: Who is going to buy TikTok? At the heart of the government’s case against the app lies a contradiction. The logic is that TikTok is the beating heart of a social-media industrial complex that mines our data and uses them to manipulate our behavior, and, as such, it is very bad for an authoritarian country to have access to these tools. Left unsaid, though, is why, if the government believes this is true, should anyone have access to these tools? If we’re to grant the lawmakers’ claim that TikTok is a powerful enough tool to influence the outcomes of American elections, surely the process of choosing a buyer would have to be rigorous and complicated. One analysis of TikTok’s U.S. market values the app at $100 billion—a sum that rather quickly narrows down the field of buyers.Tech giants such as Meta and Microsoft come to mind, which, if approved, would amount to a massive consolidation in the social-media space, giving these companies greater control over how Americans distribute and consume information (a responsibility that Meta, at least, would rather not deal with, especially when it comes to political news; it has overtly deprioritized the sharing of news in Threads, its X competitor). Bids from Oracle and Walmart have been floated in the past, both of which would amount to selling a ton of user data to already powerful companies. That leaves private-equity funds and pooled purchases from interested American investors, such as Steve Mnuchin (who, as Treasury secretary during the Trump administration, was vocally in favor of a TikTok ban) and a handful of billionaires.[Read: The moneyball theory of presidential social media]But as we’ve seen from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, putting the fate of a social-media platform into the hands of a few highly motivated individuals can quickly turn into a nightmare. A Muskian ideological purchase would mean a set of owners manipulating the app as part of an extended political project, perhaps even one that works against the interests of the United States—almost exactly what lawmakers fear China might be doing. There is, too, the ironic possibility that any outside investors with enough money to purchase the app might themselves have ties to China, as Musk himself does through Tesla. In this scenario, a sale might end up merely providing the CPC with a helpful veneer of plausible deniability.There is also the Trump factor. The law gives the sitting president broad authority to judge a worthy buyer, and it gives ByteDance 270 days to find a suitor—a period that the president can extend by 90 days. Close observers might note that there are 194 days until the next election and some 270 days until the next president is sworn into office. It stands to reason that Biden’s qualified buyer might be different from one selected by Donald Trump, who has his own media conglomerate and social app, Truth Social, and is famous for self-dealing.Trump, for his part, has reversed his opinion on TikTok’s sale (he had previously been in favor but now opposes it), reportedly after pressure from one of his China-friendly mega donors. If elected, Trump could plausibly attempt a reversal of policy or simply turn around and approve the sale of TikTok to a group with close ties to China. Or, of course, the courts could strike all of this down. Regardless of who is president at the time, this is a lot of authority to grant to one partisan authority. You can play this 37-dimensional game of mergers-and-acquisitions chess all day long, but, ultimately, nobody knows what’s going on. It’s chaos!Process matters. If you’re of the mind that TikTok is a pressing national-security threat, you’d be well within your rights to be frustrated by the way this bill has been shoehorned into law. It happened so quickly that the government might not be able to adequately prove its national-security case and might miss this opportunity. And if you, like me, believe that TikTok is bad in the ways all algorithmic social media is bad, but not uniquely bad—that is, if you believe that the harms presented by social media are complex and cannot be reduced to an Axis of Evil designation—you might very well be furious that the first major legislation against a Big Tech company is, at this point, little more than vibes-based fearmongering. The case for TikTok is debatable, but the path the government has taken to determine its fate is unquestionably sloppy and shortsighted.

Chile’s Amazing National Parks

Across the length of Chile, stretching 2,650 miles (4,265 kilometers) from north to south, more than 40 national parks have been established in the past century, protecting many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders. Collected below are images of several of these parks, from Lauca National Park in the altiplano of Chile’s far nor

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Columbia Has Resorted to Pedagogy Theater

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theatlantic.com

Columbia University shut down all in-person classes on Monday, and faculty and staff were encouraged to work remotely. “We need a reset,” President Minouche Shafik said, in reference to what she called the “rancor” around pro-Palestinian rallies on campus, as well as the arrest—with her encouragement—of more than 100 student protesters last week. Also on Monday, Columbia’s office of the provost put out guidance saying that “virtual learning options” should be made available to students in all classes on the university’s main campus until the term ends next week. “Safety is our highest priority,” that statement reads.By moving its coursework online, the administration has sent an important set of messages to the public. In the midst of what it says is an emergency, the school asserts that it is still delivering its core service to students. It affirms that universities share the public’s perception that education, per se—as opposed to research, entertainment, community-building, or any of the other elements of the college experience—is central to their mission. And it implies that Columbia is carrying out its duties of oversight and care for students.But those messages don’t quite match up with reality. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that “moving classes online” isn’t really possible. A class isn’t just the fact of meeting at a given time, or a teacher imparting information during that meeting, or students’ to receiving and processing such information. A university classroom offers a destination for students on campus, providing an excuse to traverse the quads, backpack on one’s shoulders, realizing a certain image of college life. Once there, the classroom does real work, too. It bounds the space and attention of learning, it creates camaraderie, and it presents opportunities for discourse, flirtation, boredom, and all the other trappings of collegiate fulfillment. Take away the classroom, and what’s left? Often, a limp rehearsal of the act of learning, carried out by awkward or unwilling actors. If the pandemic gave rise to hygiene theater, it also brought us this: pedagogy theater.The pandemic emergency, at least, offered a reasonable excuse for compromise. A plague was on the loose, and avoiding death took precedence over optimizing teaching quality. But now, with COVID-19 restrictions lifted, the technologies that allowed for pedagogy theater remain. The ubiquity of Zoom and related software, along with the universal familiarity they built up during the pandemic, have made it easy for a provost or a teacher to just shut the doors for any given class—or on any given campus—on a whim, for any reason or no reason. If a professor should get sick or need to travel, or if there is a blizzard, meetings can be held on the internet. In 2023, Iowa State University moved classes online after a power-plant fire shut down its air-conditioning.[Read: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]Columbia’s decision to go virtual because of campus unrest shows the breadth of emergencies that now justify this form of disruption. “Moving classes online” for everyone is a decision that universities can make whenever things go even slightly awry. A pandemic or a deranged gunman could be the cause, as could civil unrest, or just the threat of ice from an anticipated winter storm. Because this decision is portrayed as both temporary and exigent—because Zoom is treated as a fire extinguisher on the wall of every classroom, just in case it’s ever needed—schools are able to maintain their stated faith in the value of matriculating in person. In my experience as a professor who teaches at an elite private university, virtual learning is discouraged under normal circumstances. But as Columbia’s case shows, it might also be used whenever necessary. It’s the best of both worlds for colleges, at least if the goal is to control the stories they tell about themselves.Online classes are supposed to occupy a middle ground. They are almost always worse than meeting in person, and they may be somewhat better than nothing at all. But that in-between space has turned out to be an uncanny valley for education. If online classes really work, then why not use them all the time? If they really don’t, then why bother using them at all? Answers to these questions vary based on who you ask. Accreditors, which enforce educational standards, may require courses to convene for a certain number of hours. Teachers want to stay on track—but also to take a sick day from time to time, without the pressure to keep working via laptop camera. Students want to be in class so that they can get what they came to college for—except when they want to live their lives instead. And now, amid political turmoil, university leaders want to control the flow of people on and off campus—while still pretending to carry on like normal.

Taylor Swift Is Stuck in the Story

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theatlantic.com

The year was 2006. Popular music was, for women, a pretty desolate landscape. Songs such as “My Humps” and “Buttons” served up shimmering, grinding strip-pop, while dull, minor-key objectification infused “Smack That,” “Money Maker,” and similar tracks. In the video for “London Bridge,” the singer and former child star Fergie gave a lap dance to a silent, immotive King’s Guardsman, barely pausing to lick his uniform. For “Ms. New Booty,” the rapper Bubba Sparxxx staged a mock infomercial for a product offering women “a little more frosting in your cakes … cantaloupes in your jeans,” before proselytizing the message of the era: “Get it ripe, get it right, get it tight.”Against this backdrop, late in the year, a 16-year-old ingenue arrived who radiated not sex appeal but feeling. Taylor Swift at this point was a country artist, welcomed into a genre that embraced the kind of romantic imagery she played with in her lyrics: small towns, broken hearts, blue jeans, innocence that’s bruised but not shattered. Her self-titled debut record was full of diaristic songs that courted intimacy with her listeners, sharing adolescent dreams and secrets (“In a box beneath my bed / Is a letter that you never read”). But it also introduced motifs that Swift has returned to over and over since then: pathetic fallacy, the passing of time, the mythology of love.Every song on that record except two, in fact, deals with love, but in terms that make it feel more like a subject she’s intent on exploring than a consuming personal affliction. This is a novice storyteller’s idea of emotion, patchworked together out of movie clips and imaginative sincerity. On “Cold as You,” Swift compares an emotionally unavailable love interest to a rainy day: “You put up walls and paint them all a shade of gray.” In “Picture to Burn,” furious after a betrayal, she declares, “Watch me strike a match on all my wasted time.” The album is softly romantic but also notably sharp. Listening to these early songs now, I sense the initial construction of a character who’s already constrained by archetype, unsure of who she might actually be outside the apple-pie conventions of a genre.Almost 20 years later, the same metaphors and frustrations are present in Swift’s new record, The Tortured Poets Department, but they’ve calcified into a mode that, in lyrical form at least, feels like it’s suffocating her. Over 31 songs—the last 15 added in the early hours of the morning as a surprise drop—Swift portrays herself as a woman stuck in a spiral of obsessive overthinking, with new cuts seeming to open up old wounds. The pain seems realer now, more lived in, but the imagery she uses to describe it is the same as it was when she was 16. “If all you want is gray for me / Then it’s just white noise, and it’s just my choice,” she sings on “But Daddy I Love Him,” barely animated by chilling fury. Time, again, taunts her; on “So Long, London,” she sighs, “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.”This is the saddest album I’ve heard in a long time. And I’m fascinated by how jarringly it strikes down public perceptions of Swift from the past few years: the golden girl swept into a jubilantly triumphant romance with the football star, the impossibly beloved auteur of women’s emotional lives, the billionaire savior of entire economies, the lyrical subject of study at Harvard. The song that feels the most revelatory is “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” which tears down the curtain to reveal the truth behind it, scored to a frantic, pulsating, almost obscenely jaunty beat. “There in her glittering prime / The lights refract sequin stars off her silhouette every night / I can show you lies,” she sings, numbly. “I cry a lot but I am so productive, it’s an art / You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart.”What are we to do with all this pain? People wanted a boppy summer soundtrack, and they got an exorcism instead—a messy, sprawling litany of musically familiar grievances. The immediate reviews have not been kind, pointing out the clunkiness of certain lyrics and accusing Swift of solipsism bordering on self-obsession or of digging up old grudges better left buried. Critics both amateur and professional have rushed in to excavate which songs seem to be about which real people, turning a creative work into confessional fodder for the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame—a habit that Swift herself has seemed to encourage. (“I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless,” she told Rolling Stone in 2019. “So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy.”)I can agree with my colleague Spencer Kornhaber, who described much of The Tortured Poets Department as “a dreary muddle, but with strange and surprising charms, and a couple of flashes of magic.” Yet the album is also intriguing to me as an autofictional work that’s chafing at its own layers of lore and artifice. Swift has long constructed her identity out of archetype, cliché, and torn-up fragments of Americana. She’s a people pleaser, a perfectionist, an eldest daughter, a dreamer, a schemer, a wronged woman, a vengeful gorgon, a cat lady, a girl next door. But at 34, she seems to be butting up against the reality that there are no cultural models for what she’s become. Too earnest to be a diva, too workaholic to retreat into reclusion or retirement, she’s stuck being an extraordinarily rich, influential, and powerful woman who still, somehow, feels like she has no real power at all.* * *In an Instagram post announcing the release of The Tortured Poets Department, Swift described the record as: an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time—one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. Swift is asking us to read the album as a metamorphic bid for catharsis—the idea, espoused by Aristotle (whom Swift name-checks on TTPD), that staging pain and tragedy as artistic spectacles can help purge us of their effects. As someone once inexplicably compelled to write about the worst time of my life, I can empathize. But the finality with which Swift declared matters to be closed for debate is striking. This is what having an arsenal without authority looks like. Swift knows, at the end of the day, that there’s actually very little she can do to influence what people make of her.[Read: Fans’ expectations of Taylor Swift are chafing against reality]And yet, the simple existence of the record is an assertion that her version of events will be the one that endures, the one we remember. History, even recent history, has not been kind to women who attempt to reify their side of the story. In ancient Rome, a woman named Gaia Afrania who tried to argue for herself in court was enshrined by the writer Valerius Maximus as a “monster.” For speaking honestly in King Lear, Cordelia is disinherited and then executed by her lying sisters. Nora Ephron was likened to a child abuser in Vanity Fair for lightly fictionalizing her husband’s infidelity while she was pregnant with their second child in Heartburn. And when Rachel Cusk wrote about her divorce in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, one critic branded her “a brittle little dominatrix and a peerless narcissist.”Still, writers keep trying, possibly inspired by Ephron’s assertion, via Heartburn’s narrator, that “if I tell the story, I control the version.” Swift’s mission with her new album seems testimonial; she wants to have certain facts entered into the cultural archive. “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger / And put it on the one people put wedding rings on,” she states on the title track. It’s the weakest song on the whole record, with a jangling, Bruce Hornsby–like piano riff in the background and lyrics that feel half-baked. So why is it here? I would argue, for context: It documents all the particular texture of a betrayal—the grand emotional duplicity and the intensity, the beauty of flashing-neon warning signs. In the following song, “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” there’s the inevitable follow-up: “He saw forever, so he smashed it up.”Illusion also plays a big role on this record; events blur and coalesce into a fuzzy narrative wherein the clearest emerging thread is Swift’s own pain. Autofiction is a particular example of writing that performs “a push-me, pull-you of cloaking and revelation,” the critic Alex Clark wrote in a 2018 analysis of recent works in the genre. Women writers and writers of color, she argued, are the ones who are most “bedevilled by the expectation—from readers and critics—that their work is based in the reality of their own lives; what follows is a treasure hunt for the ‘real’ in their imagined worlds, and a diminution of its importance.” Since the beginning, Swift has dropped breadcrumbs throughout her albums that have been analyzed fervently by her fans. Never has it felt less like a rewarding practice than it does now, with her lyrics hovering awkwardly between the neatness of legend and what the French writer Marie Darrieussecq described as “the authentic cry of the autobiography.”Swift seems to think that if she’s not keeping us busy, we’ll get tired of her. But this mentality, too, is a trap. “The female artists that I know of have reinvented themselves 20 more times than the male artists,” she explains in Miss Americana, a 2020 documentary about a tumultuous period in her career during which she dealt with backlash for the first time and became more open about her politics. “They have to, or else you’re out of a job … I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.” In another scene in that movie, she responds to perceived failure by saying, “This is fine. I just need to make a better record.” The perfectionist’s impulse is to just do more and work harder, to try to annihilate failure with relentlessness. That narrative is a particularly American one too—as familiar as Johnny Appleseed or standing by your man. Swift loves storytelling. So why is it hard to shake the feeling that it’s ruining her?She seems, on her new album, like a woman stuck in a fairy tale, who escapes one gilded cage for another, and then another, and then another. This possibly accounts for the music feeling so static—it’s the first record she’s made that hasn’t shifted musical modes, the first whose lyrics lack methodical precision. My hope is that this album is catharsis for her: the purging not just of an emotional moment in time but also of a preoccupation with the motifs that are holding her back. On “Mastermind,” my favorite song from 2022’s Midnights, Swift herself observed how limiting romantic tropes are for women, how they have to plot with intention not to be “the pawn in every lover’s game.” The legends and stories that both her music and her persona are built on simply don’t contain enough substance for her anymore. Swift is going to have to write her own way out.