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The Atlantic

Voters Don’t Care About the Economy as Much as They Think They Do

theatlantic.com

Joe Biden is, at the moment, losing his reelection campaign. And he is doing so while presiding over the strongest economy the United States has ever experienced.The jobless rate is below 4 percent, as it has been for nearly two and a half years. Wage growth is moderating, but it is higher than it was at any point during the Obama administration; overall, Biden has overseen stronger pay increases than any president since Richard Nixon. Inflation has cooled off considerably, meaning that consumers’ purchasing power is strong.Yet Biden’s approval rating is below 40 percent. His disapproval rating is 56 percent. Donald Trump is beating him handily in most key swing states. And there’s a chance that Trump might edge out Biden in the popular vote, particularly if he continues to expand his popularity with Black and Latino voters in blue and purple states.This reality has engendered panic among many Democratic campaign operatives, and no small degree of dismay too. What does it mean if Biden can’t win a campaign as an incumbent in an economy like this—during an election in which most Americans say the economy is the most important issue to them?Voters’ dissatisfaction with Biden and Biden’s economy seems to have two central components: Americans think less of the economy than the headline numbers suggest, and they are thinking less about the economy at all.Indeed, the sunny numbers about the economy—the low jobless rate, strong wage growth, soaring wealth accumulation, and falling inequality—fail to account for some cloudier elements. Americans remain stressed by, and ticked off about, high interest rates and high prices. Homes and cars, in particular, are unaffordable, given the cost of borrowing and insurance. And inflation has moderated, but groceries and other household staples remain far more expensive than they were during the Trump administration.The majority of Americans are better off because their incomes have grown faster than prices. But most people, understandably, think of their swelling bank account as a product of their own labor and price increases as a result of someone else’s greed. People want prices to come down. That’s not happening.Americans also tend to say that even though they are personally doing well, the overall economy is doing poorly. Political scientists think this has to do with the news they are consuming, which tends to focus on the negative or to caveat good trends: Wage growth poses challenge for the Federal Reserve! Holding economic conditions constant, financial reporting has gotten more negative over the past four decades. This negativity gap was big during the end of the Trump administration, and it’s even bigger during the Biden administration. Social media puts a gloomy filter on the news too. Folks click on and share dire stories more than they do upbeat ones.At the same time, American voters’ perception of the state of the economy has become heavily mediated by their partisan biases: Republicans tend to think the economy is a wreck if Democrats are in charge, and Democrats tend to think the economy is a disaster when Republicans are in the White House. That is dampening voters’ overall assessment of the economy right now. “The size of the partisan divide in expectations has completely dominated rational assessments of ongoing economic trends,” Joanne Hsu, the director of the University of Michigan’s surveys of consumers, has concluded.Yet even many Democrats are not convinced that this is a good economy. In one recent poll, just 22 percent of self-identified liberals said they were better off now than they were a year ago. That’s perhaps because they’re all reading and watching those glum news reports. And it is perhaps because Democrats are clustered in coastal states battered by the cost-of-living crisis.The direction of the economy seems to be a factor as well. At least some leading indicators are declining, pointing to a “fragile—even if not recessionary—outlook,” according to the Conference Board, a nonprofit think tank. Debt is rising; fewer building permits are being issued; in some states, unemployment is up. (California’s jobless rate has increased 0.8 percentage points in the past year.) “Economic indicators are not speaking with one voice,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, told me. “Given the salience of inflation relative to other factors, it’s easy for the public to feel bad. It’s easy for reporters to write stories about bad things.”Still, the stock market is booming. Millennials are catching up to Baby Boomers in wealth accumulation and homeownership rates. Low-wage workers are making huge income gains. In terms of growth, the United States is trouncing its high-income peers around the world. There’s a massive boom in new-business formation. Consumers, their grumbling about high prices aside, keep spending.Yet voters don’t seem to care. The public’s perception of Biden’s economy has proved remarkably stable—even as prices have moderated, even as stocks have taken off, even as the unemployment rate has remained at historically low levels. That fits with research showing that voters pay more attention to downturns than to upturns: They seem more apt to punish a party in power if there is a recession than they are to reward a party in power for overseeing a boom. The economy might be less salient for voters when it is good than when it is bad.The trend also fits with emerging political-science and polling literature showing that economic factors are weighing less heavily on voters’ assessment of the president. Gas prices used to be a good proxy for the public’s feelings about the performance of the White House. But there has been “hardly any association” for the past decade, Kyle Kondik at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics has found. Similarly, presidential approval used to be strongly correlated with the consumer-sentiment index, the political scientist Lee Drutman has shown, but that stopped being the case back in 2004.Why is the link between the economy and political sentiment fraying? Ironically, the dramatic improvement in material well-being over the past 50 years might be part of the answer: As countries get richer, voters have more latitude to vote their values, putting topics such as environmental protection, LGBTQ rights, and racial equality ahead of issues such as taxes, jobs, and wealth redistribution. This election cycle, voters might cite the economy as being the most important issue to them when talking to pollsters and journalists, but they may ultimately show up to vote (or change their vote) on the basis of another issue—abortion, say, or immigration.Plus, American voters have become more partisan in recent decades—more likely to be immovably aligned with one party or another, and to see their political affiliation as a major component of their personal identity. Polarization “attenuates” the effect that the economy has on elections: Reliable Republicans just aren’t going to vote for Biden, and reliable Democrats just aren’t going to vote for Trump.That leaves a sliver of persuadable voters. Drutman describes these folks as “disaffected from both parties, and mostly disengaged. They skew less wealthy, and younger, than the rest of the electorate. They defy easy ideological categorization. They vote sometimes, if they can be convinced the stakes are high enough to pay attention, or a new candidate breaks through and energizes them.” At the moment, neither candidate seems to be doing a great job of engaging those pivotal voters, many of whom don’t seem to like either of them.A strong economy did not save Trump from becoming a one-term president. It might not save Biden either.

SNL Needs a Break From Donald Trump

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theatlantic.com

Whether it’s an impression from a cast member or from its teeming roster of celebrity guests, Saturday Night Live’s political sketches often favor highlighting the absurd over making a point. That approach has only snowballed in our current era, when a growing swath of politicians practically write their own punch lines. James Austin Johnson’s eerily precise rendition of Donald Trump—a far cry from Alec Baldwin’s mumbly, squinty-eyed caricature—infuses the former president with such verisimilitude that sketches featuring him don’t require much, beyond leaning into the word salad.In the cold open of last night’s season finale, SNL took on the press conferences Trump has hosted during his hush-money trial in Manhattan. “I’m really enjoying this post-court press conference in this very weird and depressing hallway,” Johnson, as Trump, began. He went on to suggest why he might really be running for president a third time: “For me, much better to not win and say it was rigged and then get very rich raising money to stop the steal and you never have to do president again.” Even if that argument had some truth, a November win could possibly erase Trump’s legal troubles—something the sketch called out, as Johnson quipped, "If you’re tired about hearing all of my trials, all you gotta do is vote for me, and it’ll all go away." His trials might, but SNL’s drained coverage of him would not.As SNL wraps up its 49th season, and looks ahead to the celebration of its 50th this fall, the show seems exhausted by what it’s treating like yet another election. In cold opens such as this and many others this season, its Trump sketches have simply replicated what the former president has been up to in the news. The show’s political commentary had more bite on “Weekend Update,” whose format lends itself to incisive wisecracks that don’t need much of a setup—as when Michael Che joked about Trump’s request that he and Joe Biden stand during the two presidential debates they’ve agreed to this summer. “So that’s the status of our presidency,” Che said. “Standing is a feat of strength.”The show’s non-Trump sketches make clear that the writers and performers can still work up sharp, engaging takes on contemporary life—provided the subject isn’t something we’re forced to think about all the time. SNL’s satire exhibited more piquancy last night with the parody commercial for Xiemu, a thinly veiled take on the fast-fashion brand Shein and the online shopping hub Temu, both of which have been criticized for pushing low-quality goods with a negative environmental imprint.The idea was pretty straightforward: The ad featured models showing off $5 shoes and $3.99 tank tops, while a voice-over revealed the horrific labor conditions required to produce such cheap clothing, and the cascading problems resulting from those conditions. (Notably, a low level of lead in all of the clothing.) By SNL’s standards, the sketch was cutting, especially when the voice-over turned on consumers. “Be real, is this shady?” asked a model played by Ego Nwodim. “If it was, would you stop buying it?” the voice-over retorted.Compared with past commercial parodies, such as the CVS send-up about men who rush to the drugstore on Valentine’s Day to purchase a last-minute gift for their girlfriend, the Xiemu bit was certainly more loaded. While calling out the obvious fell flat during the Trump cold open, the “Fast Fashion Ad” sketch managed to take a scathing stance by doing the same with Temu and Shein. Weariness is antithetical to good comedy, and perhaps SNL’s writers feel the strain of finding humor in a political climate that feels closer to a heated reality-TV brawl.Ahead of its 50th season, which will surely arrive with no shortage of fanfare, SNL has the summer to recharge for the upcoming election. Its enthusiasm for taking on politics may have dulled since Baldwin first impersonated Trump, but you’d rather it not slog through the obvious. The election itself promises enough of that.

Meerkats Keep Dropping Dead From Heart Failure

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theatlantic.com

At the start of the spring of 2015, Jeffrey, a three-year-old meerkat, was happily eating, tussling with his brothers, and surveying zoo patrons from his usual perch, his forepaws gathered and his black-tipped snout aloft. But one day in April, his caretakers discovered him in his enclosure, so weak that he could barely lift his head. By the time he was brought to Eric Baitchman, the head vet at Massachusetts’s Stone Zoo, Jeffrey was losing consciousness. Baitchman nudged a tube down his patient’s straw-size throat to help him breathe; an ultrasound revealed a heart in failure.Eight days later, despite a strict regimen of meds, Jeffrey was dead. And within the next three years, both of Jeffrey’s brothers—two of the zoo’s remaining three meerkats—would die in similar ways.All three brothers were diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy, or DCM, a serious condition in which the muscles of the heart weaken and expand, compromising the organ’s ability to pump blood. Before Jeffrey, Baitchman had never seen the disease in a meerkat, and he wondered if the family at Stone Zoo had simply been a fluke. If it wasn’t, he thought, perhaps the disease had genetic roots. Finding them might be key to saving future generations of meerkats—or maybe even people with similarly faulty hearts.Baitchman, who is on the leadership team of Zoo New England, reached out to other zoos with families of meerkats—and quickly began to hear a chorus of “Yes, us too.” Michael Garner, a pathologist who examined Jeffrey’s heart, confirmed the same pattern: For years, vets from around the country had been sending him misshapen meerkat hearts, normally the diameter of a walnut but many now ballooned out to the size of a large apricot. According to an analysis Garner did in 2017, about a quarter of meerkat deaths in an American-zoo pathology database were linked to some sort of cardiac disease, among which DCM looked to be an especially common cause.Everything Baitchman has since learned about how this disease manifests in meerkats points to his original hunch: “It almost had to be hereditary,” he told me. In partnership with a team of genomics experts, he has spent the past several years collecting dozens of tissue samples from zoo meerkats across the U.S. for genetic analysis. The team is still in the process of analyzing the 86 genomes they’ve amassed, and haven’t yet pinpointed genes clearly linked to DCM. But one of Baitchman’s collaborators, Alexander Bick, a geneticist at Vanderbilt, told me that he is hopeful that one will show up, because the condition is so easily passed on. If just one meerkat parent has it, about half of their kids seem to get it, too.[Read: Something mysterious is killing captive gorillas]Bick is interested in meerkat hearts in part because DCM is one of the most common cardiomyopathies in humans, too, and a leading reason for heart transplants. The condition can be managed with medications and implants, but eventually, many people’s hearts still fail. And although genetics is thought to play a role in the majority of human DCM cases, only about a third of them have a mutation with a known connection to the disease, Bick told me. As families have shrunk in recent decades, common genetic mistakes have been harder to trace using the traditional method of mapping a disease’s presence in sprawling family trees; certain populations of wild meerkats, inbred for generations, seem to have almost the opposite issue. The meerkat population spread across American zoos also appears to be made up of all, roughly, half-cousins, based on scientists’ best estimates—“essentially all part of one enormous family tree,” Bick told me.In recent years, plumbing the genomes of other animals has proved remarkably useful for human medicine. Dog genomes have helped researchers better understand human airway diseases, pain disorders, cancers, birth defects, and sleep disorders; studies in rhesus macaques yielded insights into the genes that influence alcohol consumption and endometriosis. The next big treatment for the lethal neurological disease Tay-Sachs could come from genetic research into cats.There’s no guarantee that meerkat genetics will reveal anything about ours. The genomes of certain breeds of dogs, which develop DCM as well, have been thoroughly scoured for clues about the disease. But the genes that underlie DCM in canines have shown almost no overlap with those in people, Katie Nadolny, a veterinary cardiologist who has been studying DCM in meerkats, told me.And meerkats are much less well understood than dogs are. Researchers don’t have a strong sense of what healthy meerkat hearts look like in the wild, Rachel Johnston, a genomics expert at the Broad Institute and Zoo New England, who has been collaborating with Baitchman, told me. They’re also unsure how common DCM might be in nature, where many meerkats live in more diverse populations, eat more varied diets, and more often die from infectious disease, or predation, or simply because they’re “famously homicidal,” Jenny Tung, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who is studying the genetics of wild meerkats, told me. Asking how different a captive population might be is a natural next step. Those questions might not yield benefits for humans, or even meerkats outside of zoos. But whatever answers researchers find could save meerkats like Jeffrey, before their hearts quietly fail.

How Drake Became White

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theatlantic.com

We’d gathered that day at the cafeteria’s “Black” table, cracking jokes and philosophizing during the free period that was our perk as upperclassmen. We came in different shades: bone white, tan and brownish, dark as a silhouette. One of my classmates, who fancied himself a lyricist, was insisting that Redman, a witty emcee from nearby Newark, New Jersey, was the greatest rapper ever. This was the late ’90s, and for my money, no one could compete with Jay-Z. I said so, and the debate, good-natured at first, soon escalated in intensity, touching on feelings and resentments that ran far deeper than diverging claims about artistic merit.“How can you even weigh in?” I still remember the kid fuming. “You ain’t even the pure breed!”With that, there was nothing left to say. Friends separated us, the bell rang, and I headed home. A short time later, I went off to college, where I would meet a wider assortment of Americans than I had realized existed. But over the years, I have been reminded of that boy’s slicing racism, the lazy habit of mind that required no white people to be present but would nonetheless please the most virulent white supremacist.Recently, two public controversies spirited me back to the suspicion and confusion of my high-school cafeteria. All spring long, an unusually nasty feud between the rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar has been captivating audiences, both for the quality of the music it has engendered and for the personal and malicious dimensions of the attacks it has countenanced. Much has been written about the fight, in particular about the two men’s treatment of women, which I won’t rehash here except to point out that it’s a little funny that they both portray themselves as enlightened allies while also acting as if the ultimate disparagement is to call another man feminine. Less has been said about the potency of the racial dimension, which feels like a throwback to a time before Drake’s pop-culture dominance—indeed, to a time before the historic hybridity of the Obama era—and like a distillation of the skin-deep racialism of the current social-justice movement.Drake, who grew up in Toronto, is the son of a white Jewish mother from Canada and a Black father from Memphis. Since the release of his 2009 mixtape, So Far Gone, he has been not only the most successful visibly mixed-race rapper—and arguably pop star—but also the most visible Black male musician for some time now. Anyone at the top will attract criticism. But not even a white rapper like Eminem has been subject to the kind of racial derogation that has been hurled at Drake.Back in 2018, the rapper Pusha T released a diss track about him for which the cover art was an old photograph of Drake performing in a cartoonish blackface. The image makes you cringe, but—as Drake explained—that was the point. Drake began his career as an actor, and he wrote that the photograph was part of a “project that was about young black actors struggling to get roles, being stereotyped and typecast … The photos represented how African Americans were once wrongfully portrayed in entertainment.” But presented without context, it appeared to be a self-evident statement of inauthenticity.Another rapper, Rick Ross, calls Drake “white boy” again and again in his song “Champagne Moments,” released in April. In an op-ed for The Grio, the music journalist Touré explains why the insult is so effective: “We know Drake is biracial. He’s never hidden that, but many of us think of him as Black or at least as a part of the culture … On this record, Ross is out to change that.” Touré calls this “hyperproblematic,” but his tone is approving—he admires the track. “We shouldn’t be excluding biracial people from the Black community, but in a rap beef where all is fair as a way of attacking someone and undermining their credibility and their identity, it’s a powerful message.”In a series of more high-profile records, Lamar has built on Ross’s theme, both implying and stating directly that racial categories are real, that behaviors and circumstances (like Drake’s suburban upbringing) correlate with race, and that the very mixedness of Drake’s background renders him suspect. It is an anachronistic line of ad hominem attack that is depressing to encounter a quarter of the way into the 21st century.Lamar’s most recent Drake diss is called “Not Like Us,” and reached No. 1 on Billboard Hot 100. It goes after Drake’s cultural affiliations with the American South. “No, you not a colleague,” Lamar taunts. “You a fucking colonizer!”It’s hard to hear that and not remember that Drake’s mother is Jewish, and that this is the same invective used to undermine Jews’ sense of belonging in Israel. Such racist habits of thought have become potent rhetorical weapons in the progressive arsenal.The second (if smaller) controversy followed an essay on language and protest published in The New Yorker earlier this month. The novelist Zadie Smith, who is of European and African descent, argued—carefully—that it is too simplistic to regard the world as sortable into categories of oppressor and oppressed. “Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them,” she writes, “a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands.” This was an attempt to take seriously the tangible fate of Hamas’s victims on October 7, the broader implications of anti-Semitism that can at times be found in criticism of Israel’s response, and the ongoing tragic loss of Palestinian life.Despite praising the protests that have engulfed college campuses and describing a cease-fire in Gaza as “an ethical necessity,” Smith was derided on more than intellectual grounds. One widely shared tweet, accompanied by a photo of Smith, stated the criticism plainly: “I feel like Zadie Smith uses black aesthetics to conceal her deeply pedestrian white middle-class politics. People see the head wrap and the earrings made of kente cloth and confuse that for something more substantive.”This was not the first time Smith had been regarded as a racial interloper. The author Morgan Jerkins once wrote of the emotional “hurt” she felt reading another thoughtful essay Smith published in Harper’s asking “Who owns black pain?” Smith’s transgression here, according to Jerkins, was “intellectualizing blackness” from a distance instead of feeling it. “Do not be surprised,” Jerkins warned, “if a chunk of that essay is used in discussions as to why biracial people need to take a backseat in the movement.”The retrograde notion that thought and action necessarily flow from racial identities whose borders are definable and whose authority is heritable is both fictitious and counterproductive. “Something is afoot that is the business of every citizen who thought that the racist concepts of a century ago were gone—and good riddance!” Barbara and Karen Fields write in their 2012 masterpiece, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. “The continued vitality of those concepts stands as a reminder that, however important a historical watershed the election of an African-American president may be, America’s post-racial era has not been born.”Of course, the first African American president was, like our nation and culture, himself both Black and white. One of the most disappointing—and, I have come to realize—enduring reasons the “post-racial era” continues to elude us is that it is not only the avowed racists who would hold that biographical fact against him.

Great-Power Politics Is Ruining the Olympics

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theatlantic.com

In 2021, on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics, 23 top Chinese swimmers tested positive for the drug trimetazidine. In its proper clinical setting, the medication is used to treat angina. But for an athlete or a coach willing to cheat, it is a performance-enhancing drug, boosting the heart muscle’s functioning. Nonprescription use of trimetazidine, or TMZ is prohibited at all times, not just during competition; the default sanction for an athlete’s violation is a four-year ban.The testing that ensnared so many members of China’s swim team was conducted under the auspices of the national anti-doping agency, known as CHINADA. Each country in international competition has its own such agency—America’s is USADA, which I serve—and they all operate under the umbrella of the World Anti-Doping Agency. WADA is the ultimate authority, responsible for ensuring that national agencies enforce the rules. Yet shortly before the 2021 Games got under way, CHINADA vacated the 23 violations, giving a cock-and-bull story about accidental contamination in the kitchen where the athletes’ meals were prepared. And WADA simply accepted CHINADA’s obviously suspect ruling.WADA failed even to publish its decision. The world was alerted only last month by whistleblowers who pushed evidence of the scandal to the media. Prompted by the revelations to respond, WADA issued a statement citing its prior conclusion “that it was not in a position to disprove the possibility that contamination was the source of TMZ” and “that, given the specific circumstances of the asserted contamination, the athletes would be held to have no fault or negligence.”WADA’s failure of oversight and lack of transparency are corroding fair competition—and that has come to haunt clean athletes around the world. If WADA had properly upheld its mission, China would likely have lost 13 of its top swimmers chosen for the Olympic team at Tokyo. Instead, China won six medals, three of them gold, in the pool.USADA has the job of ensuring that American swimmers abide by the rules and compete clean; as a result of WADA’s inaction, several of them potentially lost podium places in Tokyo that they deserved. Worse, the world body’s enforcement failures have made national anti-doping agencies such as CHINADA hostage to bad regimes, turning the agencies and the athletes they oversee into pawns in a cynical geopolitical game of prestige and power.What we are seeing is a reinvention of the bad old days of the Cold War, when East Germany tried fraudulently to demonstrate the superiority of state socialism by systematically doping its athletes. Back then, no international anti-doping movement existed, and East Germany’s cheating went suspected but largely undetected until years later. By then, it was too late for justice; the harms done—both to the athletes’ health and to the credibility of the competition in that era—were permanent. Today, we have the World Anti-Doping Agency to police international sports—but enforcement works only if the watchdog itself is unbiased, conflict-free, and effective. At the Paris Games this summer, clean competition is very much in doubt.[Read: The Olympics have always been political]In 2008, I attended the Beijing Olympics as a member of WADA’s independent-observer team. As the newly appointed head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, I was thrilled to be the WADA team’s vice chair and legal expert, and eager to play my part in upholding the integrity of sports. No doubt I was naive, but ever since that experience, a One World, One Dream framed picture from the Beijing Games has hung on my office wall.Back then, my high hopes for doping-free sports did not seem so naive. During Jacques Rogge’s tenure as the president of the International Olympic Committee, WADA was at the peak of its prowess in making the Olympics free from cheating. As a medical doctor, Rogge understood the value of keeping sports both fair and healthy for the athletes taking part—with results and records that the public could believe in. And he found willing partners in WADA’s leaders at the time, David Howman and John Fahey, who were determined to keep the anti-doping fight independent of politics.Sadly, that has changed. These days, I find I very much need that reminder on my wall of the Games’ sporting ideals. Those ideals look tarnished now: The Olympic movement is rife with examples of sports hijacked for national and political purposes. And the very agency charged with safeguarding clean competition, WADA, is implicated in the political theater.The scandal involving China is only the latest instance of WADA’s failure to uphold its mission. The erosion of its integrity and authority dates back to 2015, when Russia’s manipulations leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi were exposed. Those Games were tainted by a state-sponsored doping program that involved Moscow’s apparatchiks interfering with the testing protocols to make adverse tests of its own doped athletes conveniently disappear from the system. It became obvious that sports were being recruited as a tool of realpolitik when Russia’s foreign minister complained about USADA’s “provocative anti-Russian demands” to then–Secretary of State John Kerry, who upheld my agency’s position that Russia had to comply with the WADA rules.[From the May 2018 issue: The man who brought down Lance Armstrong]The evidence of Russian cheating was irrefutable. My colleagues and I met with the whistleblowers, including the former director of Russia’s testing laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, who had fled the country and sought asylum in America. USADA echoed the calls from several athlete groups—including WADA’s own Athletes Committee, led by the Olympian Beckie Scott, and the IOC’s equivalent committee under the leadership of another Olympian, Claudia Bokel—not to close the Russia investigation but to expand it. Yet WADA, in a now-familiar pattern, refused to listen and declined to pursue the matter.Despite my personal plea to the agency’s director general in March 2016, WADA remained unmoved by the cries of clean athletes. To be clear, these athletes make enormous sacrifices and undergo years of hard training to participate in Olympic competition. But when anti-doping agencies fail, and even abet cheats, they make a mockery of the Olympic movement. The clean athletes’ dreams are shattered by the greed and deception of those entrusted with safeguarding the purity of the Games.In the Sochi case, WADA’s intransigence proved shortsighted. Just weeks after my appeal to WADA, in May 2016, 60 Minutes and The New York Times broke the story—and forced the agency’s hand, compelling action. Congress held hearings about WADA’s failures, as it was entitled to do because American taxpayer dollars support the international anti-doping infrastructure. In fact, ironically enough, WADA succeeded in leveraging its own dereliction into an argument for more funding.The agency made a pitch to its international backers that it needed new investigative powers, more personnel, and a 60 percent increase in its budget from 2018 through 2025. It got what it asked for, but the U.S. government also did its best to make WADA accountable. It insisted on a governing seat on the agency’s board, and made U.S. funding of WADA no longer mandatory but discretionary.[Read: A list of Russia’s responses to the doping scandal]In principle, WADA’s job as global regulator is not complicated: All it has to do is apply the rules to the facts without fear or favor. But the pursuit of global power-politics in sports is a systemic problem that overrules any notion of fair play, and WADA failed to deploy its new tools effectively. When WADA received notice of the Chinese swimmers’ positives in 2021, it should have sanctioned CHINADA for its mishandling of the violations.The postive-test findings occurred just months, in fact, before Beijing was to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. So had WADA applied the rules correctly, both China and the IOC itself would have faced grave embarrassment. Instead, WADA chose to give one country—a very powerful, rising country that had already been favored as host of the next Games—preferential treatment. Do we think for a second that WADA would have overlooked the burying of these tests if they had come from a small, poor country in Africa or South America instead of China?In 2019 and 2020, WADA received almost $2 million from the Chinese government above that country’s required dues to the agency. Then, in early 2023, WADA signed an undisclosed sponsorship agreement with the largest sporting-goods manufacturer in China, Anta—a company that also has a sponsorship deal with the Chinese Swimming Federation. Although no evidence of a quid pro quo has emerged, extra payments and confidential sponsorship arrangements—coinciding with the special treatment of doping violations—create a damaging appearance of conflicted interests for WADA.[Read: It’s almost impossible to be a running fan]The influence of money and politics within WADA erodes its credibility, casting doubt on its impartiality and independence. As nations vie for supremacy on the global stage, the risk is that sports success becomes—as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said of war—“a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.” Russia and China are, unsurprisingly, the most conspicuous offenders, with the resources and capacity to bend the system to their will. But if they are allowed to have their way, other bad actors will imitate their example.Ultimately, WADA’s failures will damage the Olympic Games themselves. Who wants to watch unfair races or rigged events? The commercial machine that powers the Games—namely, the Olympic broadcaster, NBC, and multimillion-dollar sponsors such as Visa, Airbnb, and Coca-Cola—should be alarmed: The value of their investment sinks along with the competition’s integrity. The Olympics’ media and sponsorship partners ought to be acting as a powerful countervailing force on WADA to do its job properly and protect their interests.The very future of the Olympics—together with its ethos of amity, respect, and fair competition—is at stake. How many medals will be stolen from clean competitors by doped athletes—even under the noses of Western and other democratic leaders at this summer’s Games in Paris—before those who purport to back the Olympic movement take decisive action? If the Olympics are to be more than an arena for great-power games, world leaders need to act and resume their responsibility to back the world anti-doping effort. The soul of fair sports depends upon it.

A Compelling Made-For-TV Reality Season

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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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Jinae West, a senior producer at The Atlantic who works on our Radio Atlantic and Good on Paper podcasts.Jinae has been catching up on Survivor to sate her voracious reality-show appetite; she’d watch Steven Yeun in anything, and she enjoys watching Shark Tank while doing laundry. (As she puts it: “This culture survey is a real win for network TV.”)First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The one place in airports people actually want to be The art of survival The Atlantic’s summer reading guide The Culture Survey: Jinae WestMy favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I take public transit to work, so I’m addicted to what I think of as commute-friendly games. My favorite, of course, is The New York Times’ Connections, where you group together words that have something in common. (My preferred playing order is: Connections > Strands > Wordle > Crossword.) If I don’t get all the groups right away, I revisit the game later, usually on the commute home. But then, if I don’t guess another group in a sufficient amount of time, I get self-conscious about the people sitting nearby, judging me for not knowing that loo, condo, haw, and hero are all one letter away from bird names. The reality is nobody cares, and I never think about loons.Sometimes I’ll do the mini crossword just to feel something. [Related: The New York Times’ new game is genius.]Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: A few weeks ago, my niece and nephews made me play Ultimate Chicken Horse on Nintendo Switch. It’s a multiplayer game where you collectively build an obstacle course that’s full of both helpful things and perilous traps. If the whole group fails to finish a level, you respawn and get to pick another item to add.The result is generally a chaotic minefield of wrecking balls, flamethrowers, and black holes—and I’m pretty sure I got hit by a hockey puck? I lost every round and died within seconds. But Ultimate Chicken Horse is my favorite kind of game: low commitment, fun for all ages, and less about winning or losing than about making sure other people have a hard time.A good recommendation I recently received: A friend suggested a while ago that I watch the back catalog of Survivor to sate my reality-competition-show appetite. I am a glutton for it in every genre: cooking, baking, glassblowing, interior designing, dating. Survivor has more than 40 U.S. seasons—and had somehow been a big cultural blind spot for me—so it was right up my alley. Who knew that watching a person build a fire or give up the chance at immunity for a plate of nachos could make for such thrilling television? And the blindsides! Oh god, the blindsides.I started with Season 37: “David vs. Goliath,” or: “The One Where Mike White Probably Thought Up The White Lotus.” I quickly moved on to Season 28: “Cagayan—Brawn vs. Brains vs. Beauty.” Most recently, I finished Season 33: “Millennials vs. Gen X,” which was interesting to watch as a now-30-something Millennial (it aired in 2016). But as the season wore on, and the contestants shed their generational stereotypes, it became a much more compelling show for other reasons. By the time I watched the finale, I was surprised to find myself in tears. It’s a near-perfect made-for-TV season. [Related: Survivor is deceptive. That’s what makes it so real.]An actor I would watch in anything: Steven Yeun. He’s endlessly watchable. And he can sing! Toni Collette is another.A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: If Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” is pure pop summer, Ultimate Painting’s cover of the song is its more muted slacker-surfer counterpart, and very much my vibe. It’s also part of a compilation album—Lagniappe Sessions, Vol. 1—that features another great cover song: Tashaki Miyaki’s version of the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You” (which is itself an adaptation).Wet Leg’s “Angelica” is the loud song I have on rotation. It’s a track about a dull party, and it has a good beat and deadpan lyrics such as “Angelica, she brought lasagna to the party.”The television show I’m most enjoying right now: If I’m being very honest with myself, it’s Shark Tank. (This culture survey is a real win for network TV, I guess.) Once a show I only considered watching in a hotel if nothing else was on, it has now been upgraded to a show I watch in my everyday life while doing other things. The stakes are just high enough to keep me invested and just low enough for me to walk away from the deal (to go fold laundry or something).Is the show an overt celebration of capitalism? Yes. Is it a warped version of the American Dream? Sure. Is “Hello sharks” a mildly funny punch line to use on many occasions? You bet! Unlike, say, America’s Next Top Model or The Voice, the show actually does have a track record of investing in a few hits. I mean, once upon a time, Scrub Daddy was just a man with a sponge and a dream.My fiancé has bought at least one thing from Shark Tank: a little fast-food-ketchup holder for our car. We’ve used it maybe once? Twice? It was fine. The show is fine.Also: Baby Reindeer. Watch it with a friend. You’re going to want to talk that one out. [Related: The Baby Reindeer mess was inevitable.]The Week Ahead Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, an action film starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the eponymous character trying to make her way home in a postapocalyptic world (in theaters Friday) Tires, a comedy series co-created by the comedian Shane Gillis about a crew working at a struggling auto shop (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Butcher, a novel by Joyce Carol Oates about a 19th-century doctor who experiments on the patients in a women’s asylum (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. The Dream of Streaming Is DeadBy Jacob Stern Remember when streaming was supposed to let us watch whatever we want, whenever we want, for a sliver of the cost of cable? Well, so much for that. In recent years, streaming has gotten confusing and expensive as more services than ever are vying for eyeballs. It has done the impossible: made people miss the good old-fashioned cable bundle. Now the bundles are back. Read the full article.More in Culture The Baby Reindeer mess was inevitable. Amy Winehouse was too big for a biopic. The cruel social experiment of reality TV What Alice Munro has left us The wild Blood dynasty Conan O’Brien keeps it old-school. Catch Up on The Atlantic The Israeli defense establishment revolts against Netanyahu. George T. Conway III: The New York Trump case is kind of perfect. Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves. Photo Album Gentoos, which are the fastest swimmers among penguins, surf a wave in the ocean. Levi Fitze / GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2024 Check out the top images from the German Society for Nature Photography’s annual photo competition.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The General Intendant’s Daughter

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The girl’s expressive gifts surpass those of all the members of his company, even the aging starlet Klamt. That is something the General Intendant of the City Theater can no longer deny.Up to this point, he has done everything in his power to keep his daughter off the stage, for the General Intendant is intimately acquainted with the unscrupulousness of theater people and is well aware that if he casts her in a leading role, she will be subjected to the most malicious slander.And so will he.But in light of her expressive gifts, which have now achieved a perfection he once hardly thought possible, he must concede that withholding them from the city whose theatrical life he has sworn to cultivate (but which, under his supervision, has grown only more decadent) would be an intolerable abdication of his duty.The General Intendant therefore risks the opprobrium of the public, and the rage of the aging starlet Klamt, by commissioning a play for his daughter to star in, one especially suited to her expressive gifts, the action of which should include, he suggests to the dramatist, the following basic elements:The curtain should rise on a man in a straitjacket scrutinizing the large stained-glass window above the altar of the chapel of a psychiatric facility. The man, who for some time has existed in a perpetual present tense, suddenly remembers that he himself, in his prior life as a glassworker, created this stained-glass window, which depicts five female saints who were decapitated for their faith. He marvels at the fact that he, who now feels so far from the beautiful, was once capable of bringing such beauty into the world. As he studies the window, the man feels an urge he has not felt in a very long time: the urge to bring more beauty into the world. If he cannot bring more beauty into the world, through his mastery of the craft of glasswork, he would prefer to die. The man proclaims as much to a chapel that the audience has thus far taken for empty. But from the two wings two stout old nurses appear, brusquely tighten the arms of his straitjacket (which had already seemed as tight as possible), and inform the man that in this institution there is of course no opportunity to work with glass. As if they would let the inmates work with glass! The laughter of the nurses echoes in the chapel long after they have clacked away. But a glassworker who can never again work with glass is better off dead. He opts to die. The facility, however, has seen to it that he has no means of doing so. He despairs. Yet at the height of his despair, more memories return to him. He suffered his first fit of insanity while he was installing this stained-glass window—he remembers that now. From the time of that initial fit, he could foresee the fate that has since overtaken him—namely, that upon completion of the window, he would be committed to this very institution for the rest of his life. But while his insanity was still only intermittent, he could outwit fate by means of his craft. Yes, he recalls realizing that, too. He had then done something to the stained-glass window, or committed to memory some secret about it. He had secretly installed it in such a way that the stained-glass window would later enable him to escape through it. The clarity and force of this recollection makes the man reel. But when he tries to remember what the secret of the stained-glass window is, he cannot. Yet even this he must have foreseen, for in those first transient fits of insanity, his mind was stripped of its memories and left only with such things as are common to the species. He must have known that supplying himself with a means of escape would not be enough: He had to find a way to remind himself of the form it took and the secret of its use. He must have known that he could not entrust his memory with something as important as this; nor could he write it down, since a written message would be confiscated on admittance. He must have relied on another person. But in the whole world, as far as the man was concerned, there was only one other person. The man suddenly recalls the existence of his beloved. He remembers teaching his beloved the words she should say to him after he went insane and was committed here: Your name is Gustav. You are a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is your own handiwork. You must simply … and come back to me. Simply what? The very words the man needs most have been expunged from his mind. He recalls rehearsing the lines again and again until his beloved could recite them without error. Yet his beloved has never been to visit him. Where is his beloved? What has happened to her? He confides in the chief physician about his beloved. Not about the message she was to deliver, only about her existence. But even this is a mistake, for the chief physician (to be played by the great actor and tenor Silberberg) lets it be known that he wants to hear nothing more about the beloved, in whose existence he plainly disbelieves. No one at the facility believes in the existence of the beloved—no one, that is, except the two stout old nurses, who until now have struck us as cruel and unfeeling crones (one to be played by the aging starlet Klamt). In the middle of the night, the nurses enter the man’s room and convey their belief in the existence of the beloved. They pledge to locate the beloved. Lo and behold, they do locate her. They bring the beloved to him. But can this be her? This is his beloved?! The man weeps. His beloved exists now in a lamentable state. She cannot walk. She cannot speak. Only her eyes move, to and fro. Yet the movement of her eyes, viewed even from the very last row of the balcony of the City Theater, is extraordinarily expressive. To the attentive theatergoer, this movement of the beloved’s eyes expresses everything that needs to be known about her relationship to the man. The one thing it cannot express, however, is the secret message she was supposed to impart to him. This secret message is locked within his quasi-vegetative beloved. He therefore sets out to do what not only the chief physician but even the nurses try to tell him is impossible: teach his beloved to speak again. He brings her to the chapel. Positions her cane-backed wheelchair before the altar. My name, he tells her, is Gustav. I am a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is my own handiwork. I must simply … and come back to you. Hour after hour, with remarkable tenderness and devotion, he says these words to his beloved, always pausing long enough at the ellipsis for her to leap in and impart with miraculously restored speech the secret of the stained-glass window. But she never leaps in. Her speech is never restored. Only her eyes move, to and fro, to and fro, in a manner that is exquisitely expressive, but not of the right thing. Now visiting hours are over. The clacking of the nurses gets louder and louder. They are coming to the chapel to take away his beloved. He knows that they will not bring her back. Not ever. He tries one last time: My name is Gustav. I am a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is my own handiwork. I must simply … He pauses. She says nothing. Yet this time—and it does seem to him a miracle, even if it is not the one he expected—he is able to whisper the missing words himself. I must simply smash my head hard through the glass and come back to you. Now the man shatters the glass by thrusting the crown of his head through the middlemost of the five female saints. As blood streams down his face, he kisses his beloved on the lips and then climbs through the opening where the window had been. He is now free to bring more beauty into the world. The nurses enter the chapel. Their clacking ceases. For a moment, the theater is absolutely silent. Then the beloved, her face streaked with blood, suddenly leaps to her feet and screams: Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! The implication is that he—who is to be played by the City Theater’s most physically massive actor—is responsible for her condition and is now free to commit more crimes. But this is something the attentive theatergoer will have long since deduced from the movement to and fro of her eyes. The nurses, who do not remark on the shattered window and actually seem hardly to notice it, now wheel the beloved out of the chapel. As they do so, the General Intendant suggests, the curtain should fall. Of course, he leaves the particulars to the imagination of the dramatist.The malicious slander anticipated by the General Intendant begins as soon as the cast list of The Glassworker is pinned to the wall and Klamt discovers that instead of the beloved, she is to play one of the two stout sexagenarian nurses. And that the beloved is to be played by the daughter of the General Intendant.The gist of the slander, which can no doubt be traced back to Klamt, is that the infirmities and limitations of the beloved are also those of the General Intendant’s daughter. That the daughter cannot walk, that she cannot speak, that she expresses herself with her eyes only because she is unable to express herself by any other means. That The Glassworker has been contrived specifically to allow her father to cast her in it. That only a play in which the leading lady is absent from Act I and sits mute and motionless for nearly all of Act II is one that could even conceivably feature the General Intendant’s daughter at the top of the bill.This malicious slander pains the General Intendant. But it moves him to see how little it seems to pain his daughter. She could of course disprove it in an instant. She would only have to stand up or speak. One word would be sufficient. What gives this slander some purchase is her determination to do no such thing. To rehearse the role of the beloved completely in character. To have her father wheel her into the City Theater every morning and wheel her out again at night. To have him lift her onto the stage in his arms. To communicate with no one, not even with him, not even one word. A part of him even envies the degree to which her commitment to her art leaves her indifferent to the world and its scorn.The world is something to which he himself, both as a father and as an arts administrator, has for a long time not been in a position to be indifferent.Nor is he indifferent now. The General Intendant gathers his company. It is true that The Glassworker is contrived, he says: It is contrived to remind you how much an actor can express with even the smallest gesture. The simplest gesture. The Glassworker is indeed contrived—contrived to remind the public of the power of the theater, to remind us in the theater of the power of our art. A power we have all forgotten.The company murmurs.But given the daughter’s refusal to disprove the slander, it does not go away. It only intensifies. It is whispered, presumably first by Klamt, that anything expressed in her eyes is in fact without meaning or intent and bears only an accidental relation to the text of The Glassworker. That her baffled expression isn’t acting, it is actual bafflement. That her horrified expression is actual horror. That when the General Intendant (who receives special permission from the director to join each rehearsal as a kind of informal co-director) devotes all of his co-directing energy to directing his daughter, and in particular to directing, or co-directing, her eyes—which must convey to the last row of the balcony that that man is no glassworker, he’s a bricklayer, and what he’s brought into the world is a far cry from beauty—those hours and hours of rehearsal time are gone, simply gone.How, the General Intendant points out to his company, if you honestly believe the cruel things that you say, do you suppose she will be able to leap to her feet at the climax of the play and exclaim, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer!The company murmurs. That’s true. But it is pointed out by Klamt in turn that the scene in which the beloved exclaims, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! is the one scene that is never rehearsed.Finally, and in front of the whole company, the General Intendant kneels before his daughter in her chair and begs her with tears in his eyes and his head in her lap to break character. Not for her sake, he knows she doesn’t care what they think, but for his! He is weak! He does care! But when she doesn’t break character even to decline what he begs of her, he tells the company that he is proud of his daughter and ashamed of himself. Only someone so committed to her role and so indifferent to the world is entitled to call herself an actor.After this, the malicious slander about her expressive gifts is repeated less often, and less gleefully.Not, however, by Klamt, who if anything only escalates her abuse.Klamt claims that the General Intendant does not even come from the world of drama. He comes from the world of dance. He impaired his wife with dance! Slew her with an undanceable dance! A dance no one could dance! So, first of all, they were taking their dramaturgical guidance from someone who has no formal training in theater! And who murdered his wife through choreography! This in the opinion of the finest physicians! But by his lights, she wasn’t dead! No, he took her home. Sustained her somehow, though not in a way anyone would wish to be sustained. Saw an opportunity in all this: a dance opportunity! An opportunity to “start from scratch,” dancewise! Didn’t have the decency to let her die, had to make her keep dancing instead! Of course, this dance didn’t pan out. At first, there was promise. Her movements struck him as entirely new. Or rather—old! Primordial! From a stage in the development of the human organism that preceded our fall into sociality and culture and the stink of the city! Never mind whether they could really be called “dance movements”! He was struck above all by one movement. At intervals, a finger shot to her now-bald brow and traced an arc across the side of her skull. A prehistoric gesture, he thought! The meaning of which was inscrutable to him! Must stem from the innate nature of man! Upon this one primeval movement an entire school of dance could be founded! But no. One day, he notices a painting of them on the eve of their wedding in which she is making the very same movement. Coquettishly tucking a strand of hair behind one ear. Now there is no hair on her head and possibly no essence to her person, but the fashionable world is still moving her muscles! There is no “preceding our fall into sociality”! No escape from “the stink of the city”! No “prehistory”! No “starting from scratch”! Not once you’ve walked even one city block! He decides to have another child by her. Doesn’t know if this is possible. Finds that it is! This one he raises properly! Pristinely! In the dark! In the midst of the city but sheltered from the gestural tyranny of the city! Food through a slot, water through a hole and into a shallow trough! Sheltered from a city that without our knowing it is always telling us how to move and how not to! Enters her room only when she is sleeping so as not to influence her with his movements! Wants nothing more than to embrace her tiny sleeping form but restrains himself in case upon waking she retains a memory of that motion! By a thousand such self-sacrifices ensures that hers is the first childhood free from violence! No movement possibilities are foreclosed to her! Everything is possible! She can move any which way! How his daughter chooses to move is for the first time in the history of man a genuine choice! Now he simply waits to see how she will choose to move! How she will choose to dance! But—she chooses not to move! She chooses not to dance! She chooses to sit! Or else (Klamt has heard it told both ways!) the way in which she chooses to move and dance obliges him to inhibit her movements by means of straps, for her own sake, after which, even once free again, she ceases to move! Whatever the case: After a certain point, there is no movement! No dancing! Yet he cannot quite disabuse himself of the notion that she is, for all that, a dancer! To admit that his daughter is no dancer is to admit that the way he raised her may not have been in her best interest! Only in time does he disabuse himself of the notion that she is a dancer! And only by means of another notion onto which he’s able to transfer the same psychological load: that she is an actor …Now Klamt has gone too far. The members of the company turn away from her in disgust. Imagine reacting so poorly to losing a role! And the stout old nurse is still a speaking part, that’s more than most of them got!Klamt herself becomes the subject of slander. In her increasingly baroque and frankly hysterical rumormongering, some in the company claim to detect not only the rancor of an ousted starlet but also the rage of a jilted lover, an innuendo that the General Intendant asks them to rise above but also does not explicitly dispel.Meanwhile, a consensus begins to form among the members of the company that the daughter’s performance is “powerful.”Rumors of her expressive gifts spread beyond the walls of the City Theater. Before the public has even seen her onstage, she becomes the recipient of an outpouring of adoration.And on the night of the premiere, she leaps to her feet at the climax of the play and exclaims, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! The company is willing to testify to that, the audience is willing to testify to that. She leaped to her feet and exclaimed, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer!—the whole city is willing to testify to that, no one will deny it.No one, that is, apart from the aging starlet Klamt. Again and again she refuses—and loudly!—to admit it. Eventually, she is sent to Dr. Krakauer’s sanatorium. Here, Klamt is asked continually by Dr. Krakauer whether it is possible that the General Intendant’s daughter said what everyone heard her say, and Klamt just missed it. She knows that admitting this possibility would be enough to get her discharged. She simply has to say the words It is possible that the General Intendant’s daughter said the words Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! and that night she would sleep in her own bed. And privately, she will admit that of course it is possible, anything is possible. But Klamt, too, is committed to her role.This story has been excerpted from Adam Ehrlich Sachs’ forthcoming book, Gretel and the Great War.

850 Bryant

Repatriate yourself! he laughed. Make yourself at home,feel comfortable. I come from a family that laughs aboutconjugal visits. They’re our origin story. My father, keeperof the broken bells and county jails, moved stacks of min-imum sentencing laws over so I could have a seat. Whenhe turned I saw the hump in his back, the bruises fromall the books

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